Award for excellence in teaching

New prize spotlighting top USC Law professors will be awarded in April; students invited to submit nominations

USC Law this spring is honoring excellence in teaching with the inaugural William A. Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award.

Nominations of full-time, tenure-track or clinical faculty by any student or faculty member are currently being accepted.

The award, established by William A. Rutter ’55, recognizes the dedication of standout teachers, and the extra effort and time they commit to their students.

Nominations should include brief descriptions of the professor’s teaching excellence and must be submitted to Carmel Boerner in Room 124A or via e-mail. Nominations are due on Thursday, March 15.

The recipient will be selected by a committee made up of the law school dean, the president of the Student Bar Association, the chairperson of the USC Law Board of Councilors, and the person who received the award the previous year (except for the first year of the award). The winner will be announced at the law school’s annual awards luncheon on April 11.

Rutter pledged $1.2 million to USC Law last year to establish the award, which will grant $10,000 per year for five years to an outstanding professor.

“I see this award going to the kind of professor who exposes students to different ways of thinking,” Rutter says. “My hope and expectation is that the award will encourage younger faculty to devote more time to classroom teaching, in addition to their scholarly research.”

Rutter is a longtime Legion Lex and Board of Councilors member who in 1979 founded The Rutter Group, one of the leading legal publishing companies in the country. He also wrote and published all of the original Gilbert Law Summaries, the most popular study aid for law students in the country, and with former business partner Sydney M. Irmas ’55 co-founded the company that became BAR/BRI Bar Review, which offers the largest bar review course in California.