Deanell Reece Tacha
Dean, Pepperdine University School of Law

Born 1946 in Goodland, Kansas.

Deanell Reece Tacha became the sixth dean of Pepperdine University School of Law in June 2011.

Raised in the small Midwestern town of Scandia, Kansas, Judge Tacha earned her BA in American studies at the University of Kansas (1968) and her JD from the University of Michigan Law School (1971) in an era when women in law were a rarity.

Following law school, Judge Tacha was named a White House Fellow, where she served as a special assistant to the secretary of labor at the US Department of Labor (1971–1972). Afterwards, she worked in private practice in Washington, DC, first at Hogan & Hartson Associates (1973) and then in Concordia, Kansas, where she was director of the Douglas County Legal Aid Clinic (1974–1977).

Judge Tacha joined the faculty of the University of Kansas School of Law in 1974, and was named associate dean in 1977 and associate vice chancellor in 1979. She served as vice chancellor of Academic Affairs of the University of Kansas from 1981 to 1985.

She was the national president of the KU Alumni Association and received its Fred Ellsworth Medallion for extraordinary service to the university (1992). She also received the KU Distinguished Service Citation (1996).

On October 31, 1985, Judge Tacha was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to a new seat on the US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (created by 98 Stat. 333). She was confirmed by the US Senate and received her commission on December 16, 1985.

Judge Tacha served as chief judge of the Tenth Circuit from 2001 to 2007. In 2008, she received the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award from the American Judicature Society.

In service to the American Bar Association (ABA), Judge Tacha has been the Judicial Division chair (1995–1996); chair of the US Judicial Conference's Committee on the Judicial Branch (1990–1994 and 2001–2005); and a member of the Commission on Women in the Profession (1991–1994).

Elizabeth Ghaffari: Would you tell me a little about your early years in Kansas?

Deanell Reece Tacha: In January 1946, World War II was just ending and my dad had just gotten out of the Navy. My mother had recently lost her brother in the war and was spending some time with her parents in Kanarado, Kansas—a little town in the northwest corner of the state. While I was born in Goodland, I grew up almost entirely in Scandia, Kansas—another small town with about three hundred and fifty people in the north-central part of the state. I'm the oldest of four girls.

Scandia is a little Scandinavian community. My grandmother was Swedish, like many in the community who had came out west from Chicago. I went to a grade school where classes were so small they fit two classes into one room. I always like to say I was the top 10 percent of my class because I think there were only about 11 people in my high school graduating class. I have always thought that it was one of the best educations I could have possibly gotten because the teachers took great interest in me. For example, my third- and fourth-grade teacher kept me after school every day, and we spelled through the dictionary twice because I wanted to do the spelling bees. I did very well in the spelling bees. We didn't have any frills, but we had very good and dedicated teachers.

Ghaffari: What did your father do for a living?

Tacha: He founded a highway construction company. One of my earliest childhood memories was standing with my father, my grandfather, and then President Eisenhower, near Abilene, Kansas, opening the first stretch of the interstate highway system. My dad, granddad, my uncle, and now my youngest sister, Mary Lou, have all been in the highway construction business.

My mother was the company treasurer, although not really involved in the operations. She was the consummate volunteer and a Republican National committee woman from Kansas for over twenty years. She was very much involved in Republican politics. Her passions were politics and volunteer work.

Ghaffari: Why did you choose Kansas University?

Tacha: I thought I was going east to college. I never really considered any place else. It was affordable, and it was where I was going to go. My major was in American studies.

Both of my parents graduated from Kansas University. My father studied business, and my mother got a degree in journalism in 1942. My grandmother, on my mother's side, went there, too. She was in the first class of nurses from the University of Kansas Hospital in 1903. There were five women in that class, two of whom were sisters.

Ghaffari: Wasn't it a little unusual for a woman to apply to law school in the late 1960s as you did?

Tacha: I was “pinned,” which in my fraternity/sorority world meant that I was sort of destined to get engaged and go off to do rather traditional things. But, there was something about that that just didn't feel quite right for me. It wasn't about the man, it was just about me. I thought, “I'm just not through with my education yet. I really want to do more.” At that time, you could take the LSAT in your senior year and still get into law school. Unbeknownst to anyone else, including my pinmate and my parents, I took the LSAT, the GRE, and the MedCAT.

I ended up getting my best score on the LSAT—a fact that was startling, to say the least. As you properly observed, I knew no women lawyers, let alone women judges. I did, however, know a dean of women—that was typical in those days—at Kansas. Emily Taylor. She was incredibly far ahead of her time—anyone who was at Kansas will tell you that. She was instrumental in helping Title IX¹ get passed. At Kansas, she took a group of fairly traditional young women and convinced us we could do whatever we wanted to do. She kind of made us—she wouldn't take “no” for an answer.

Emily Taylor was the first person I talked to after I passed the LSAT, and she thought it was great. Then I got up my courage to talk with the dean of the law school at the time, James K. Logan. He also encouraged me to go. He ended up being my colleague on the Tenth Circuit Court. I went to see several other people who had been mentors or just good faculty—of course, they were all males. They all encouraged me. Now, as I look back on that, I think, “What a wonderful open attitude they had” because nobody said, “Why would you do such a thing?”

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Except my dad, who was very opposed to the idea. I had taken the test and scored well. I had taken my spending money and applied to all of the great law schools in the country. Then, wonder of wonders, I got into most of them. I realized, “I've got to tell people I'm doing this.” At the time, I lived in a sorority house at Kansas. One Sunday evening, I called my dad and said, “Well, Dad, you know what? I have something to tell you—I'm going to go to law school!” There was silence on the line. My dad was a wonderful man, but he had a bit of temper. So, I expected an explosion. But there was none. It was quiet. All he said was, “Well, that's interesting.” And that seemed to be the end of it.

But, five hours later, which is exactly the time it takes to drive from my little hometown to Lawrence, Kansas, Dad came to the door of the sorority house. He took me out for coffee at four in the morning and, for the next several hours, tried to talk me out of this craziness.

He said, “Deanell, when you could do anything you want to do, why would you pick the one thing you can't succeed at?” He spoke the truth from his own experience. He had never seen a woman lawyer. He had never seen a woman judge. And he really didn't like lawyers because he was a construction guy. His famous quote was, “I never go see the lawyers first. I go afterwards and ask them to get me out of it.” His experience with lawyers had been anything but pleasant.

When he realized I wasn't to be deterred, he said, “Well, at least you're going to Kansas, aren't you?” And I had to say, “No, Dad, I've been advised that it would be smart for me to go somewhere else.” His last ditch effort was, “But you have to go to a state school.” And I said, “Okay, I'll go to Michigan.”

Ghaffari: Why did you choose a state school? Was that because of the cost?

Tacha: It was partially about affordability, but remember that this was the late sixties. I had a very traditional family. A lot of things were happening on college campuses—especially on the East Coast. At the time, Michigan seemed like a pretty safe Midwestern state university. But, as it turned out, Michigan ended up being one of the most volatile places in the country!

Ghaffari: What did your mother say when she heard about your plan?

Tacha: She was not as vocal as my father. Clearly, now she applauds it. At the time, she was worried and nervous about me doing something that was so nontraditional. But both of them ended up supporting me and helping me enormously. My dad never got over apologizing. Every time he introduced me, he'd say, “This is the lawyer.”

Ghaffari: What did your “pinmate” have to say?

Tacha: Yes, I had to carry this news to the man at the time. He was very nice, but it just didn't work out. It was the wrong time.

Ghaffari: What did you like especially about law school?

Tacha: Everything, even though the first year was very, very trying for several reasons. One thing was that I was such a good undergraduate liberal arts and sciences person, but that wasn't necessarily the best fit for law school. I had to hone my analytical skills in ways I had not anticipated. I was accustomed to knowing everything from the Magna Carta forward. But, in law school, the skill is focusing quite precisely on issues, on problem solving, and on the relevant, supporting material. One certainly doesn't learn that as a liberal arts undergraduate.

The other thing that I have come to realize was difficult—but didn't realize it at the time—was being among so few women. To give you a sense of what I mean, those were the days when, in criminal law, they would call on the women to describe the rape cases. You would have to stand up and give all the details. It was mortifying.

But, quite simply, we just wanted to do well. So, we powered on through it all. One of the best things that happened to me—still, to this day—is that among my dearest friends in life are the three women with whom I lived on campus at Michigan. One of them lives in LA, and we just had dinner together last week.

We were reminiscing about how we came together sight unseen—we didn't know each other. Women couldn't live in the law quadrangle, so the law school just sent out a list of people looking for a place to live. The four of us came together in the tiniest, two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom. The woman who became my roommate probably is six-feet, one- or two-inches tall, while I'm lucky to reach five-feet, one inch. I moved in before she did. Those were the days of short-short skirts, so my first impression of her was that my skirts looked like they belonged on dolls, while her skirts looked excessively long. We hadn't seen each other—we'd only seen each other's clothes.

My roommate and I ended up being fast friends, along with two other women. All four of us get together at least once a year—in fact, we're getting together in two or three weeks.

We studied a little bit together, and we were in the same section, but it was pretty much independent work.

Ghaffari: What did you excel in at law school? Did you have a favorite subject?

Tacha: I really liked it all. As in all education, I think it's dependent on who were the faculty and who were your great professors. Certainly, I ended up with some fabulous professors in my section. There were names like Theodore St. Antoine, who was dean at the time and taught labor law, so I loved labor law. I had Yale Kamisar, who is well known in criminal law, and Grant Nelson for constitutional law. I was very fortunate in that the whole lineup of faculty members was just excellent. I wouldn't say that I excelled or anything, but I just liked what I did.

Well, maybe I did excel at moot court. I did very well at moot court. It was all that practice. I think it must have been second year, before my final moot court arguments, when again I was the only woman in the finals in my section. I wasn't the least worried about my case because I knew my material. But I was a little concerned about two things—my tone of voice and what I would wear. There were no real role models or at least very few that I'd seen. So, I went to a very well-respected male faculty member, and he gave me the best advice of my life. He said, “Be yourself.” So I wore a bright green dress, and I won.

Ghaffari: How did you come to be a White House Fellow after law school?

Tacha: The plum job after law school, even then, would have been to clerk for a court of appeals judge. And as it turns out, there had been a couple of women from Michigan prior to me who had clerked. But, no one suggested to me that I apply for a clerkship, so that just wasn't even on my radar screen.

I was taking local government law from Professor Tom Kauper and, to his great credit, he said to me, “You ought to look at this White House Fellowship program. I think you'd be well suited to it.” He gave me the application and a brochure. I thought it was a long shot, but I filled it out and was selected. Even though there was a long history of White House Fellowships, my memory is that I was just the seventh woman—and the only Kansan—ever selected.

So, I went off to Washington to be a White House Fellow and a special assistant to the Secretary of Labor, James Hodgson. I worked mostly with the undersecretary, Larry Silberman, who ended up on the DC circuit. White House Fellows are always assigned to a cabinet member, but the actual job that they do varies, depending on the needs of the department and the cabinet officer.

Half of the White House Fellowship is like employment, working as a special assistant to the cabinet officer, while the other half is an educational program. During the course of the year, you meet almost all major leaders of the nation—corporate, government, nonprofit, everybody. And we took two international trips. It was at the height of the Vietnam conflict, so the first trip was to Vietnam and all the border states around China, right before President Nixon's trip to China. The second trip was to Central and East Africa on what was more of a trade mission.

I had become very involved in the work of the Labor Department, and so they asked me to stay on after my fellowship ended. I continued to work as a special assistant to one of the assistant secretaries at the Labor Department for another few months after the second election of Nixon. After that, I went into private practice law at Hogan & Hartson in Washington, DC.

Several law firms talked to me, and I had come to know the partners and hiring partners in a number of firms. I was attracted to Hogan & Hartson because they were doing a lot of communications and securities law, both of which interested me.

Ghaffari: You only spent a year with them. What happened?

Tacha: I loved it, but ever since my first year in law school, I had been dating a high school basketball coach from Concordia, Kansas, whom I met when I was volunteering. As a woman, I couldn't get summer employment and had no money, so I volunteered at a little law firm in Concordia, Kansas, worked part-time for my dad, and lived at home. John Tacha was the basketball coach, a math teacher in the local high school, and was teaching driver's ed. He and his buddy, the editor of the local paper, were driving around one day, when the friend said to John, “Hey, there's a chick over at the law firm. You should go over and check that out.” So, we went on a blind date.

You could just imagine it—here I am, pretty “high cotton” from all these years in Ann Arbor, Washington, and international travel. Then there was John, who was going to be a high school basketball coach in Concordia, Kansas. He wasn't going to move, and I said, “I'm not coming back to Kansas.” So this goes on for several years. Finally, after I'd gone to the law firm and was really thinking about the rest of my life, I realized, “This is my first priority. I love this man. He's the right partner for me.” So, I sent him a singing telegram, in his high school math class, that said, “Yes, September 2.”

I moved back to Concordia, Kansas. I must admit that, at the time, I thought I'd given up my career. No one would hire me. But there was one lawyer, Thomas J. Pitner, a sole practitioner, who allowed me to come in with him and use his library. I think he might have even given me some of his clients. It was absolutely a wonderful experience. I took whatever cases came in off the street—deeds, divorces, you name it—general practice.

I had several great role models. There was one elderly judge, Marvin Brummett, who was something of a legend in Kansas as a great state district court judge. One day, I had my first divorce case before him. I had prepared well and thought I was this hotshot lawyer who knew everything. I was just finishing examining my client, when this very kind, wonderful role model of a judge looked up at me and said, “Counsel, you may wish to ask her where she lives.” Well, domicile is the most important thing to establish in a divorce case, but I'd failed to ask it. My client never knew that I failed to do the obvious because the judge just gave me the nicest possible lesson in a wonderfully collegial way.

Yes, good men everywhere. Then, just six months later, the KU Law School called me and wanted to know if I'd teach. Would I drive the three-and-a-half hours to teach a course one day a week? Well, of course, I wanted to do that.

By this time I was pregnant with our first child, so here was this little pregnant lady teaching law. That summer they invited me to be a full-time faculty member—which was a very difficult decision, personally. John was very happy where he was, but I really wanted to accept that job. My memory is we decided we would take turns making the big decisions and that this was my turn. All the big decisions turned out to be about location, not kids or money or any of those things.

I got the chance to go full-time on the faculty. John quit his job. We moved to Lawrence. Ultimately he got another job and ended up with the business that he now owns, but he never went back into teaching or coaching. He owns a business called the Bureau of Lecturers and Concert Artists, which is a booking agency for live entertainment for assembly programs at schools all around the country. He was hired by the man who owned it in September 1974. When that man died the following Thanksgiving, his family decided to get rid of the business and sold it to John. He still owns it. Right now, his market niche is bringing four or five troupes of Chinese or African acrobats into the US.

Ghaffari: Tell me about your family.

Tacha: We were married in 1973. John, our first, was born in 1974, Dave in 1976, Sarah in 1979, and Leah in 1983.

There's no doubt in my mind that my best accomplishments are my four children. I'm so proud of them, and they're such interesting, very different people. They all grew up in the same family with the same dynamics, yet they have gone in such different directions and expressed themselves in such very different ways. None are lawyers.

My older son has just returned to Lawrence to help his dad in the business. My second son is an insurance broker in Denver. My older daughter is teaching third graders in Vancouver, Washington, in a school that one would describe as not very privileged. And she's making such a difference for those little kids. And my younger daughter is an artist in New York, trying to make her way in the arts. They are just totally different children, and I'm very proud of them for that.

Ghaffari: What did you teach at the law school?

Tacha: I taught property and administrative law. Also, I was director of the Douglas Legal Aid Clinic. We actually had a case that ultimately went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. An NCAA scholarship athlete came into the clinic because had been denied a government scholarship known as a BEOG.² The NCAA had told him he had to choose between the two. He couldn't take both. I'll never forget it. He looked at me and said, “You know, the rich guys on the track team can take the money from their parents and their NCAA scholarship. I qualify for the BEOG because I have no money from my parents, but they won't let me take both the BEOG and the NCAA scholarship. It just isn't fair!”

So we sued both the NCAA and the university, among a bunch of other people. It morphed into a much bigger lawsuit, but the bottom line was the determination that athletics programs—NCAA athletics programs—were not state actors. He prevailed at the circuit court level, but unfortunately did not win at the Supreme Court level.

Ghaffari: Why did you move over to the administrative side as associate vice chancellor and then vice chancellor?

Tacha: I've always loved administration and actually that's the reason I'm back in higher education at Pepperdine. I've always loved the challenge, particularly in an educational institution, of balancing all the academic priorities with the interests of the institution, the interests of the alumni and the students, all of the myriad interests in a nonprofit milieu.

You know, you can measure your progress in a for-profit milieu by pretty objective standards, but in the nonprofit—and particularly the academic world—you've got to be in it for the long haul and for the good of future generations. You cannot see your success in day-by-day increments. No short-term parameters. If you do, you sell the institution and its future short.

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I loved administration. I started out as associate dean of the law school, then I went out as chief academic officer of the University of Kansas at a pretty young age.

Ghaffari: What would you say would be some principal accomplishments that come to mind when you remember those days?

Tacha: The most direct accomplishment would be establishing a program called University Scholars. It was at a time when honors programs were falling out of favor—anything that sounded elitist was discouraged. I decided that I was not buying into that at all. I actually patterned the program largely on the White House Fellows' program, but within the university. I took very promising sophomores, assigned them faculty mentors, and then put together an education program on top of the regular academic program in which they would meet some of our best scholars, administrators, just a mixture of leaders. If I remember right, we took about twenty sophomores each year.

The program just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary two or three years ago. There was a big reunion, and I got to speak to them. Some of the people who were university scholars went on to just amazing careers. For me, one of the great rewards has been watching the people you help to find their way. You don't make it happen. You can only help people who want to become leaders.

Another memorable accomplishment is one that was not so happy, but still I'm proud of what we did. We had to cut the budgets at the university quite significantly during the time that I was vice chancellor. Sound familiar? I made the decision that we weren't going to do it across the board. Instead, we were going to make the hard choices, and I believe that that served the university well.

Ghaffari: How did President Reagan come to name you to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals?

Tacha: As you probably know, the president usually receives recommendations from somebody like the [Senate] Majority Leader at the time, Bob Dole, who's a Kansan, and his sidekick and mine, [former Senator] Nancy Kassebaum, who also was from Kansas. I give full credit to my mother on this. She had been friends and supporters of these politicians for a long time.

I'd like to say it was all on merit, but it also was “the mother's network.” They had created a new position in Kansas—there had been only one.

Initially I resisted the offer—feeling it was just too soon in my career. I was very happy at the university, my last child had just been born, and I really didn't want to go onto the bench, yet.

Bob Dole gave me what turned out to be very smart advice. He said, “If you're ever going to do it, you better do it now.”

Ghaffari: How did your family feel about the court?

Tacha: They were all very supportive. For my mother, of course, it was great because it kind of thrust me back into government. For my own family, my husband and my children, it was really good even though I traveled a lot. It's very much a personal and individual job, so you could do it night and day, weekends, or whenever. I always had the flexibility to go to their school programs whenever court was not in session. In between court terms, I had great flexibility to be very involved in my children's lives.

I was fortunate, too, that I had a guardian angel—today, we would call her a nanny—who came into our lives when our oldest son was just a baby. She's still in our lives, like a part of our family. She made everything that we did possible. In addition, my husband is just all-world. He has been as much or more a caregiver than I am. So I don't think my kids missed much. You know, occasionally they'd complain when I was gone or something. Still, I think if you ask them today, they'd say, “Well, it didn't affect me much.”

Ghaffari: As you look back on that twenty-five-year career on the bench, can you give me a sense of what might have been some of the highlights from your own professional perspective?

Tacha: There's no doubt that the most memorable part of the experience was my colleagues. The people on the federal bench are as good public servants as you'll find anywhere around the world. They are not in it for their personal reward, obviously. They are—without exception—bright, dedicated, hard-working, and very nice people. You are a bit isolated on a court, so you've got to like the people with whom you work because you can't talk to the lawyers and you can't talk to the parties. So, the reward of getting to know a group of people who were federal judges was—for me—just extraordinary. I learned from every single one of them.

I had the great privilege of working with two great chief justices. Chief Justice Rehnquist was my close friend, and more recently, Chief Justice Roberts. I give Chief Justice Rehnquist amazing credit because he appointed me chair of one of the most significant committees for the federal judiciary when I was a pretty new judge, and I'll never forget it. It was the US Judicial Conference Committee on the Judicial Branch, responsible for relationships with the other two branches of government. I chaired that committee twice—once in 1990 to 1994 and again in 2001 to July 2005.

Ghaffari: What did you accomplish on that committee?

Tacha: One of our main responsibilities was to try to increase pay and benefits and accoutrements for the federal judiciary. Now, my colleagues will tell you I was less than successful at that, but we did get one significant pay raise, when my predecessor was chair. We worked very hard on that but, more broadly, our charter was at the junction of relationships among the three branches of the government. When there were issues that needed to be addressed, we were consulted either by Congress or the attorney general or whoever was involved. Most of our efforts were focused on the well-being of the federal judiciary.

Ghaffari: Were there other women justices?

Tacha: There's Dorothy Nelson from the Ninth Circuit. Carolyn King from the Fifth Circuit, who also was the chair of the Executive Committee. Rosemary Barkett is Circuit Judge for the Eleventh Circuit, and Ann Williams of the Seventh Circuit. There are more today than ever before, and several women now hold really important positions in the judiciary, which is sort of surprising considering how recently we all came on our courts. But I give great credit mostly to the chief justices who put those women in those positions. So, yes, I had quite a complement of women leaders in the judiciary.

Instead of doing any kind of inauguration here at Pepperdine, I decided to invite three women federal judges to come here and teach a brief session this September 23, 2011.³ We're just going to tell war stories. I thought it would be good for young women students to hear what it was like, because they don't know today many of the issues we confronted back then.

Some of these opportunities are precarious. We take them for granted. As the economy gets tight, it's often the people who are in precarious economic straits who will feel the adversities the most. I'm not afraid for myself, but I view myself as speaking in part for the powerless. And I worry terribly about what the effects of the economy are going to be on all these children, on all people on the edge.

Ghaffari: As you look back over twenty-five years, are you able to highlight any decisions that might stand out as particularly memorable?

Tacha: I always resist that question because, to the people involved, they are all important cases. I can say that the capital cases were some of the hardest. All six of the states in the Tenth Circuit, plus the federal government, had the death penalty, so we got a fair amount of capital litigation.

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When I was in the circuit, there were a lot of tragedies—horrible things happened. We had the Oklahoma City bombing, the Los Alamos Labs case, and the Columbine case, to name just a few. Even so, it felt as if the time went by in an instant.

Ghaffari: When you were on the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, what was that experience like?

Tacha: That was from 1987 to about 1993 or 1994. Hillary Clinton chaired that commission.

That was an unforgettable experience because it was the first time the ABA ever looked at these issues. Hillary and I are almost exactly contemporaries. We each have daughters the same age. At the outset, I have to admit that I didn't realize who Hillary Clinton was, but I certainly saw her skills. We met monthly for all those years, and that commission was an eye-opener for me.

There were three of us who were—to put it not so delicately—the old women of the group. The third was Lynn Hecht Schafran.⁴

Most of the other members were somewhat younger. The three of us felt that maybe some of the battles had already been won and that there was a fair amount of parity and equality in the profession. I remember very vividly some public hearings in Philadelphia where we heard these rather touching stories of women who were trying to raise families and whose law firms weren't flexible enough to give them the kinds of opportunities they needed. We finally began to realize that the profession itself still had a lot of structural impediments. That's what I meant by “precarious”—those opportunities have a tendency to disappear in tight economic times, such as those we are facing today.

Ghaffari: What was the Commission able to accomplish?

Tacha: We did a lot of different things—issued reports, talked to law firms, urged firms to implement flextime and part-time as a normal course of business. We also established an award, the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, established in 1991, to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of women lawyers who have excelled in their field and have paved the way to success for other women lawyers. It's given every year to five or six really outstanding women lawyers or judges.⁵

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Ghaffari: How was it that you are a Republican and Hillary Clinton is a Democrat, yet you were able to bridge that gap?

Tacha: Oh, we're friends. We've been friends. We probably don't agree on all issues, but we do agree on the opportunities for women.

Ghaffari: Would you say that your experience with the ABA taught you about governance?

Tacha: Somewhat, but the ABA is very large, and the governing body is a little bit difficult to manage. So, while I did learn from my ABA experience how to work with very, very different kinds of people, still I think I learned most of my governance in higher education.

I've stayed on the Board of Trustees of the KU Endowment Association because I really enjoyed seeing that side of educational governance—the investment and development side.

Ghaffari: How did you happen to become a trustee of St. Paul's School of Theology?

Tacha: I went onto that board right after I went onto the bench, serving as chair of the academic committee. I was there for almost twenty years. As a judge you can't do anything in the for-profit world, and you can't do anything that would be any kind of a conflict of interest. So the only boards that I could serve on were philanthropic or educational. I'd been a long-time United Methodist, and St. Paul's was in Kansas City. I greatly admired the president at the time, Dr. Lovett Weems. He's a well-known Methodist theologian who is now at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC.

Ghaffari: How did the Pepperdine invitation come about?

Tacha: That you will have to ask them! I had no intention of leaving the judiciary. I was happy. I was eligible for, and took, senior status. It was going to be a nice quiet life—finally a little bit more relaxing life than I'd had up to that point. Then Pepperdine came calling. They had established a search committee. They invited me to apply.

There were many ways in which Pepperdine and I had crossed paths. President Andy Benton, for whom I have the most respect, grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, where we still have a home. David Davenport, a previous president here, was my student at the KU Law School. Grant Nelson taught me constitutional law at Michigan.

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There were just many ways that I felt called to come back to higher education in a place where values count, where I thought I might have a piece of molding lawyers of the future. When you reach my age, it's not about me—it's about what you might do to help shape a more humane future.

I have become so disenchanted with the cacophony of public life that I am now working around the theme of “lawyer patriots” who model civil discourse, who listen to all sides of an issue, who bring their human values to bear on problem solving. “Lawyer patriots” are those who may—the idealist in me believes—be able to give my grandchildren at least a little bit more of an informed and thoughtful future.

Ghaffari: How do you begin this endeavor?

Tacha: For me it's easy. You get to know people. You get to know the culture a little bit. I spent my first two weeks having about hour-long chats with every faculty member. Maybe, later you might do some tweaking of the culture. Of course, students aren't here yet, so I've been trying, to the extent that I could, to get acquainted with the central administration.

Even though I joined Pepperdine on June 1, I haven't had as much time as I'd like because I was already committed to teaching at Oxford. I had agreed to teach a course for the University of Oklahoma at their Oxford campus, so I couldn't very well back out of that. I taught a course on the meaning and characteristics of the rule of law. The course was only eight days, although their summer program is two months long. I spent the middle weekend in London with the students and faculty of Pepperdine's summer program.

Ghaffari: What do you see on the horizon for legal education?

Tacha: I think that it's an exciting time in legal education. Now some would say it's a crazy time, but I would say it's exciting. The Carnegie Commission Report expressed their views on what needs to happen in law schools. The ABA and the American Association of Law Schools are considering some rather different standards for law schools. The public—mostly the media—is questioning whether law school is worth its salt or worth its dollars. I find these to be fascinating issues. We're having a faculty retreat in a couple of weeks. I've invited one of the authors of the Carnegie Commission Report and one of the most outstanding deans in the country to talk with us about the future of legal education. Then, we're going to form some task forces around those themes.

Ghaffari: Will you be including any of these women's issues that you've talked about earlier, or is that not necessary anymore?

Tacha: I don't know if that's not necessary. I would say that diversity issues generally are extremely important. Also, because this is a Christian law school, I think it's part of the mission to be inclusive and to understand that our future depends on our ability to be tolerant, inclusive, listening, and thoughtful in how we move into a very different culture than we've known.

Ghaffari: You've expressed an interest in enhanced capital funding to retrofit the law school building. What do you have in mind?

Tacha: It's largely about how you build community. This building was state-of-the-art in the seventies. We've learned a lot about building community, and I speak not only of law schools, but of everywhere. Where we put our hallways, our sidewalks, and our access points has a really clear impact on the kind of community we are. We have the most gorgeous location on the face of the earth, but we don't have very many ocean views. The students have even fewer views. We want to be very sensitive to all of the environmental and coastal issues here.

I believe that the community experience could be considerably enhanced by some significant changes in the building. It would not be a new building. It would be retrofitting and change. My favorite thing to say is, “Where's the guy with the pick ax? Get some walls down.” At home, I was on the board of a health foundation, and I learned so much from an expert about how you plan communities. For example, my father was instrumental in building the interstate system, but it bypassed and killed many communities. Today, our nephew is working to reroute roads through cities to recapture those opportunities.

A former clerk of mine wrote a wonderful book called Law's Environment,⁶ where he takes five case studies of what happened on the ground to communities. We learned all about sidewalks in the health foundation. Think about sidewalks. Where do we put them? For years, we put them right by the busiest streets. Kids couldn't walk on them, and people took their cars rather than walk or bicycle. If we had put sidewalks behind the busiest streets and crisscrossed them, we'd have created common space. We're learning these things now, but rebuilding communities is really hard.

A good example of where this is being done is in Stapleton, just outside Denver. My son actually lives there. It's a very sustainable, park-oriented community. The houses are close to the street, but back onto a big common area. The kids ride their big wheels. Everybody gets to knows everybody. The mothers write blogs about who they saw in the neighborhood. It's just awesome.

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Ghaffari: Your husband is still in Lawrence?

Tacha: Yes. That was the hardest part of this decision. I told you that, along the way, the toughest decisions were all about location. He's always supported me in whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it. When I began to think about Pepperdine, he said, “I'm not moving to California.” Well, he's five years older than I am. He's got his business, he's got his buddies, he's got a life. We have a place in the country that he just loves. He's been a huge volunteer in the community, the church, and in other areas. I go there when I can. Similarly, when I was at the university, he went when he could. He actually didn't go to very many court functions. And that's been fine. We've been pretty much independent in our social lives, in our sort of day-to-day activities. So, he said, “It's fine with me if you go, and I'll visit sometimes.”⁷

One of our agreements has always been that we didn't make each other go to the other's commitments. Still, it's hard to be half a country away. You do worry as you get older about health issues and things like that—but so far, so good. And we'll just see.

Ghaffari: Think back about when you were in law school, when there were no women on the faculty, and there were only fifteen women peers. How do you feel now that you are a woman out there who is an affirmative role model to many young women, not just in the law, but in the court as well as in academia, and now in law school? How do you feel about that leadership role?

Tacha: I feel it's a very, very important responsibility, not because I see myself as a role model, but because I want, to the fullest extent possible, to model opportunity for young people. Not that they should do what I did— because you know, I've probably done way too much—but rather I'd like somehow for my life to tweak another life, for young students to say, “I could do this, I could be this”—whatever it is. I've always resisted stereotypes, because that's what kept my dad from wanting me to go to law school. Stereotypes have molded so many people, men and women alike, for too long. When I think of people of different ethnicities trying to model the WASP model, I see it just doesn't work. My old faculty member's advice comes back to me. “Be yourself!”

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A student came in here the other day, laughing at me because he read an article from my hometown newspaper on the internet about my Christmas decorations. He said, “You do Christmas decorations?” Well, of course I do. I love Christmas decorations. I don't mind being the traditional woman. I love it. I want people to realize that those things that are strong pieces of their personalities are the same things that make them strong leaders.

Ghaffari: Where do you see the greatest opportunities for women today?

Tacha: I see opportunity everywhere. And this is one of the things I love about living as long and seeing as much as I have. I saw a lot of this in the judiciary. Women's role models are very good at organizing playgrounds and universities and government, among other things. I try to resist stereotyping in this area, but I do think there's something in our brain makeup or hormones or whatever, such that women really do like to listen to other people. We really like to learn about other people. We like stories.

I love seeing so many women writers come forward because they speak in stories more than in statistics. As I watch women, I really believe they live their lives in stories much more than they do in objective measurement. I've met an awful lot of good, really powerful women who, when you ask them what the bottom line is, they'll say, “I don't know.” But they are really powerful women.

Ghaffari: Where do you see yourself in the next five to ten years?

Tacha: I'll be at Pepperdine for a lot of that time. It's hard for me to think about anything other than continuing to be challenged and interested. I was given very good advice by Darryl Tippens, the provost to whom I report. When I was struggling with this decision, he told me, “You know, my momma taught me that we often have to be re-potted to grow.”

I've thought about that many times because it's so true. So, I say to young people all the time, “Reinvent yourself. Just reinvent yourself.”

Ghaffari: You've made so very many career choices. Are there any choices that you wouldn't make if you could go back to do it over again?

Tacha: My sisters laugh at me all the time about this. I never look back. I just don't look back. Once I've made a decision, I move on. And I think it's made me very happy.

Ghaffari: As you look at the students here, is there advice that you would give to men that would be different from the advice you would give to women?

Tacha: No, I think that's really important because the “be yourself” advice applies to all of us. In a way, it's almost belittling or stereotyping to think that we categorize people—whether by gender, ethnicity, or religion.