It’s hard to put Seattle University School of Law Dean Kellye Testy into a neat category. She is a feminist who believes in private markets and a business law professor who believes in economic justice. “Some people from my school of thought would be called socialists,” Testy said. “I would never be accused of being anything other than a capitalist.”
An expert in corporate governance, who lectures internationally and is widely published, Testy’s corporate governance experience ranges from consulting with mom and pop shops (before going to law school) to being an expert witness in a groundbreaking suit by Myanmar villagers against oil giant Unocal over human rights violations. She is a beloved business law and bar preparation teacher, whose law school courses include Contracts, Corporate Governance, Corporations and Public Policy and Economic Justice. She has long been devoted to the law school’s twin goals of academic excellence and social justice. Among her accolades, Testy recently received the Public Justice Award from the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association.
She has approached her job as dean with a keen combination of both her passions — governance and justice. She says looking at higher education like a corporation, ensuring that it’s well-run and that the customers — the students — get the most for their investment is key.
“The study of governance has helped me enormously in the governing of higher education,” she said.
Testy, who assumed her role in February 2006 after 13 years at the law school and tenure as associate dean for academic administration, has high aspirations for the law school. She aims to position Seattle University School of Law as the premier private law school in the Northwest. She is making great strides by hiring outstanding faculty, providing students with a growing wealth of opportunities — including international study — and increasing connections between the law school and legal community. She also hosts “The Docket,” the TVW program sponsored by the Washington State Bar Association.
Before becoming dean, Testy was instrumental in the founding of the Access to Justice Institute, the Seattle Journal for Social Justice and the Center on Corporations, Law & Society (CCLS). CCLS offers the Northwest’s premier Directors Training Academy and draws top-notch scholars and attorneys every year.
“Kellye is a corporate law scholar who is also deeply committed to social justice and who recognizes not only the great things that corporations offer society, but also the harm they can cause as well,” said CCLS Director Dana Gold, a 1995 S.U. School of Law graduate.
“Starting the Center on Corporations, Law & Society to create a place that promotes constructive dialogue and scholarship on how corporate law and governance relate to the public interest was quite visionary, since the role of corporations in society is more significant than ever before.”
Testy has written about corporate law from a social justice standpoint for years. Her scholarship has been printed by some of the nation’s leading law reviews, including Duke Journal of Law & Contemporary Problems, Northwestern Law Review, the New York Journal of International and Comparative Law and California Law Review.
She has spoken at academic conferences on topics such “Contracts and Socioeconomics,” “Weaving Social Justice into the Law School Fabric” and “Adding Values to Corporate Law.” She has been invited to speak at law schools in the United States and abroad, including at Yale, Duke, Cal Western, Tulane, Toronto’s Osgoode Hall, the University of British Columbia and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City.
“A lot of what we have learned after the Enron controversy is what I have been talking and writing about for a long time,” Testy said.
Gold said the cultural and legal landscape completely changed post-WTO and post-Enron.
“It evidences great leadership by Kellye to facilitate the thinking and conversations about how social, economic and environmental injustice need to be understood through the lens of corporate law and structure in order to promote long-term solutions,” Gold said.
Growing up in Indiana, Testy was the first in her family to go to college — which she admits she did mostly to play sports. But she reveled in the academic setting. It didn’t take long for her to realize she had a calling to the law, and when she pursued it, she went on to graduate first in her class from Indiana University School of Law and serve as editor-in-chief of the Indiana Law Journal. She also became dedicated to working to increase access to legal services and ensuring equal protection.
“People with power don’t understand what it is like not to have it,” she often says.
She says she knew from early on that not everyone enjoys the same access to education or opportunities. “I was always interested in economic justice,” Testy said. “I was not from a family of economic means.”
As noted above, the dean was an expert witness in a civil case representing 15 Myanmar villagers who sued Unocal over the construction of a pipeline, arguing that the corporation could be held liable for the government’s forced-labor practices — and reports of rape and murder along the pipeline corridor. Unocal settled the case with a payment to the villagers and a commitment to protecting human rights.
She remains interested in developing economies and finding ways to help them that work within their cultures and infrastructure. She most recently spoke in Mexico City, where she gave a lecture on corporate law at the UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Juridicas.
“Developing economies fascinate me, so I’m interested in international programs,” Testy said. “Understanding governance means you understand you can’t just pick up something from the United States market and transport it to another country.”
In an effort to increase the ranks of underrepresented groups among law school faculty and deans, Testy also serves on the Committee on the Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers of the Association of American Law Schools. To encourage women and minorities to pursue deanships, she is hosting a two-day workshop at the School of Law this fall. Co-sponsored by the Society of American Law Teachers, “Promoting Diversity in Deanships” is designed to increase the ability of non-traditional dean candidates to break through the glass ceiling that is keeping these groups under-represented in decanal ranks.
As Seattle University School of Law embarks on its 35th year in 2007-08, which will include a kickoff celebration in Tacoma on Oct. 17 and a spring gala in Seattle, the dean looks forward to finding more ways to engage the law school in the community and to enhance the legal education it provides.
Dean Testy meets many of her goals with a similar attitude that has made her successful in law and academia:
“If you blend justice and governance, you can do it.”
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Katherine Hedland Hansen is the director of communications at Seattle University School of Law.
