By Steve Thorpe
Legal News
University of Detroit Mercy has announced the appointment of Phyllis L. Crocker as the new Dean of the School of Law, effective July 1.
“The university looks forward to welcoming Professor Crocker to the University of Detroit Mercy community and seeing the many contributions she will make in advancing the School of Law,” Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Pamela Zarkowski said in a statement.Crocker is currently a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University, where she recently served as Interim Dean and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
“It is an honor to join UDM as the next dean of the law school,” said Crocker in a statement. “I am excited to become part of a law school that has such a strong and longstanding commitment to preparing students to be excellent, ethical attorneys ready to represent their clients and serve their communities.”
UDM Law had been searching for a new dean since well before the retirement of Dean Lloyd Semple last year. Professor Troy Harris served as interim dean starting on Aug. 1.
After graduating from Yale University and Northeastern University School of Law, Crocker clerked for Judge Warren Ferguson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
She was then an associate for three years in a Chicago law firm specializing in complex federal civil litigation, including civil rights and commercial class actions.
An acknowledged expert on death penalty law, Crocker was also a staff attorney at the Texas Resource Center, a federally funded community defender organization that represented indigents on death row in their post-conviction appeals, from 1989 to 1994.
Crocker also chaired the American Bar Association Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Team that published “Evaluating Fairness and Accuracy in State Death Penalty Systems: The Ohio Death Penalty Assessment Report,” published in 2007.
She was named to the Steering Committee of the ABA Death Penalty Due Process Review Project in 2010 and, in 2011, she was appointed to the Ohio Supreme Court and Ohio State Bar Association Joint Task Force to Review the Administration of Ohio’s Death Penalty.
Crocker joined Cleveland-Marshall in 1994 and has taught Capital Punishment, Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure I and II, and Externships.
She was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2006 to 2010 and Interim Dean from March 2010 to June 2011.
While Interim Dean, she expanded the externship program, reformed the curriculum, raised funds for the construction of a state-of-the-art trial courtroom and increased fundraising, while leading the law school through a university-wide budget reduction process.
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