Leonard Strickman
Leonard P. Strickman (born April 14, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York) has been the Dean of three law schools. Most recently, he has served as the founding Dean of the Florida International University College of Law.
Strickman was born and raised in New York. His father, a chemist who had lacked the means to go to medical school, hoped to see one of his sons receive a medical degree. Strickman therefore entered college as a pre-med student, but found himself instead drawn to the study of law. Strickman attended Yale Law School, where he served as member of the Board of Editors on the Yale Law Journal.
His first academic position was as a member of the law faculty at Boston University, which he left to spend two years as Minority Counsel to the United States Senate Select Committee on Equal Education Opportunity. He returned to teaching law at the Boston College Law School for nine years, then became Dean and Professor at the Northern Illinois University College of Law for the next nine years, leading the law school from provisional to full American Bar Association accreditation and membership in the Association of American Law Schools. Strickman then served as Dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law for eight years, during which time he spent six years on the ABA Accreditation Committee. In the 1980s and 1990s, he chaired fifteen accreditation site visits for the ABA.
Strickman joined Florida International University in January, 2001, and has since successfully guided the law school to provisional accreditation at the earliest possible time, in August 2004, and to full accreditation in December 2006. Florida International University School of Law received an initial third-tier ranking in its first year of eligibility in the U.S. News & World Report in 2007.
