“What you are doing here is institution building. You’re an institution builder,” concluded Harvard Law School Dean Irwin Griswold at the end of a dinner conversation in Zaria, Nigeria, where I was working as a Peace Corps Volunteer to help establish the Northern Region’s first law school. Griswold was on a fact-finding mission to examine African legal education. I nodded hesitantly, since, up to that point, I had never thought of myself as “an institution builder,” had never been called that by anyone, and was not altogether sure what “institution building” entailed.
That conversation took place in the fall of 1963, just a few months after my graduation from Harvard Law School. During the next six decades, my career would lead me to ...
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