In the spring of 1997, Thomas C. Arthur, then associate dean for academic affairs at the law school and co-director of Emory’s American Law Center in Moscow, bumped into a former law student at a dinner held there during the annual meeting of the Coca-Cola Company’s European legal staff. The student, Pamela Barge, was now representing Coke in Oslo, Norway.

“I thought, now, what did we do to prepare her for that?” says Arthur, who became dean of the School of Law August 1. “She didn’t necessarily want to practice abroad, and she didn’t specialize in international law. She just wanted a job at Coke.”

Arthur offhandedly recounts this chance meeting to illustrate a trend that he says Emory’s law school must continue to ride: the ever-increasing globalization of legal practice. Few are more keenly aware of this trend than Arthur, an antitrust specialist who joined the Emory faculty in 1982 and has been helping to raise the law school’s global consciousness since. Most recently, he directed Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Learning and served as interim vice provost for international affairs. He has been associate dean of the law school and in 1996 and 1997 directed the American Law Center in Moscow, a program through which Emory taught Russian lawyers the basics of U.S. law. Arthur also has taught antitrust and civil procedure courses to two decades of budding Emory lawyers.

Before coming to Emory to teach twenty years ago, Arthur was a partner with the firm Kirkland and Ellis in Washington, D.C. The landscape of antitrust practice has widened dramatically since he began practicing in the 1970s, as U.S. business interests explode overseas.

“I did antitrust work for clients like GM, and at that time I could do that and know nothing but American antitrust law,” Arthur says. “We have been sitting on our own continent, not having to know much about legal practice in other parts of the world. That has totally changed–totally.”

Thanks to deliberate moves by leaders including former Dean Howard O.“Woody” Hunter and the appointments of a number of prominent international faculty members, Emory’s law school already has been gaining strength and visibility in its international and comparative law programs over the last decade. Arthur means to elevate Emory’s global profile even more by weaving an international component into the required curriculum. He also plans to continue to boost the law school’s trial training program, one of Emory’s strongest assets.

Arthur, who attended Duke University and law school at Yale, chuckles when he remembers that he nearly became an American history professor, but chose the law instead. “At that time, I wanted to keep the option of being more in the world,” he says. “It’s ironic because basically what I’ve done is made my way back to the academic community. The things that made me want to be a professor finally won out.”

University President William M. Chace says that after twenty years at Emory, Arthur is familiar with every aspect of the law school. “He has a keen intellect, a judicious manner, and a tenacious ambition. I am convinced he will bring the school to even greater prominence and well-being,” Chace says.

Richard Freer, associate dean for the faculty at the law school and head of the dean search committee, adds that Arthur is “a respected scholar and outstanding teacher. He has been a leader on this faculty for many years in many ways, and has the respect of the entire community. The future looks very bright.”–P.P.P.

F. Stuart Gulley can remember the precise moment he hit upon the title for his book about former Emory President James T. Laney. On the evening after Gulley finished his third and final one-to-one interview with Laney, U.S. President Bill Clinton appeared on national television to admit he had misled the public about his dealings with a White House intern. Gulley says he was struck by the gulf of difference between leading by vocation and leading by moral example. He called his book The Academic President As Moral Leader.

“Laney, more than any research university president of his era, believed that an academic president was fundamentally a moral leader,” Gulley writes in his introduction. “The moral authority of the president, for Laney, derived from the fact that a liberal arts education in and of itself was a moral endeavor. Thus . . . the president was to demonstrate those qualities of moral leadership that would have a leavening effect throughout the institution.”

Published last year, The Academic President As Moral Leader traces the arc of Laney’s presidency from 1977 to 1993, the period of Emory’s breathless climb from respected regional institution to major research university. But as the title suggests, Gulley’s account is more than the story of Emory’s and, by extension, its president’s success; it is rather a thoughtful examination of how Laney (left) infused his leadership with a deliberate moral and ethical consciousness and balanced the University’s fortune with vision.

Gulley spent ten years at Emory, the first seven of which coincided with Laney’s presidency. He earned his Master’s of Divinity in 1986 and then rose to the position of associate vice president for university development and church relations before he left in 1996 to become president of LaGrange College.

In examining the whole of Laney’s tenure, Gulley concludes that his leadership–and its legacy–shaped Emory in ways that can’t easily be explained by simply listing Laney’s various strengths and chronicling his triumphs. Some of his most identifiable assets, Gulley observes, were his vision, clear-headed ambition, passionate devotion to the liberal arts, dogged determination, and ability to tolerate the ambiguity that often characterizes the university culture.

Gulley credits Laney’s oft-stated moral vision for Emory with the event that had perhaps the greatest impact on his presidency, the 1979 Woodruff gift of an unprecedented $105 million. Spurred by his desire for excellence, Laney purposefully nurtured his friendship with Robert W. Woodruff and his brother, George, an alliance that resulted in what was then the largest philanthropic gift ever made to an American university.

“Jim carefully cultivated the Woodruff interest in the University, and he did it in a way that focused on the total University and not just the health sciences, which had been their primary interest,” Gulley says. “This enabled a lot of things that could not otherwise have been done.”

With riches came responsibility, and Laney was constantly challenged to balance his drive for success with his steadfast integrity, Gulley says. For example, he never allowed money to be spent on improvements at Lullwater beyond what was strictly necessary, lest he give the impression that he was using Emory’s fortune for personal gain. But he used salaries to attract desirable faculty from other universities.

At a reception hosted by the Candler School of Theology to celebrate the book, Laney expressed gratitude for Gulley’s recognition of his efforts. He grew emotional when he spoke of the support he received from others, in particular his wife, Berta. “I have to say that from my high school years on,” Laney said, “there was one true North, and one true love.”

“A University is a unique thing, an incredible organism, with all its pursuits, intricacies, and involvements,” Laney went on. “But what really goes on is sharing from one generation to another. You have laboratories, sophisticated libraries, computers, all these things that mark modern life. . . .But the University is really that juncture from past to future. And that juncture has to be marked by what we care about, what we value, as well as by what we know.”–P.P.P.