
What Makes a Public Law School Great?
What makes a public law school great? Dean Andy Hessick argues it takes excellence in two roles at once, as a law school and as an institution created to serve the people of its state.

Martin Brinkley ’92 picked up his oboe expecting a morning of thanks to others. Instead, the room turned the tribute back on him with the School’s first professorship dedicated to corporate law.

Robby Fensom ’26 is now clerking for Chief Judge Richard Myers II ’98, a fellow Chancellors Scholar who once taught at Carolina Law. He says a publicly funded education left him with a duty to give back to North Carolina, and this clerkship is where he’s starting.

Linzy Mahoney ’27 dropped all her papers in front of the judge on her first day in court. By year’s end, she was winning objections against seasoned attorneys as a student parent defender in Carolina Law’s new Family Defense Clinic.