Brietta Clark (JD 1999) named first woman and first Black dean of LMU Loyola Law School
USC Gould School of Law alumna Brietta Clark (JD 1999) made history when she was named the 19th dean of Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Loyola Law School (LLS). She became the first woman and the first Black dean of LLS in its 103-year history.
“It does feel like an awesome responsibility to know I’m the first Black person in this position, the first woman in this position, because I am aware of the powerful effect this can have for groups that have been underrepresented in the legal profession and in academia. Seeing others who look like you, and who have come from similar backgrounds, achieve this level of success can help inspire underrepresented students to believe in their own leadership potential and to resist the idea that there is some limit to what they can achieve,” says Clark, who is also professor of law and a J. Rex Dibble Fellow.
“I love Loyola. I love the people here, and I love what it stands for and what it does. I think this is a privilege and responsibility, and I want to make sure I’m treating it with all the respect it deserves as a role model going forward.”
Clark officially becomes the next Fritz B. Burns Dean effective June 2024, after serving as LLS’ interim dean and senior vice president since July 2023.
Clark joined the faculty in 2001, distinguishing herself as a nationally recognized expert in health law and bioethics. Her scholarship and public service focus on inequity in health care, and she co-authored the ninth edition of “Health Law: Case Materials and Problems” (West Academic, 2022) the leading health law casebook in American law schools. In her previous leadership roles with the law school, including associate dean for faculty, Clark helped advance its strategic vision and demonstrated a commitment to DEI. But leading the law school was not part of her career plans.
“I did not ever see myself in this role,” she says. “It was really only because of people like my prior dean, Michael Waterstone, and so many of the faculty and alumni who encouraged me to see myself in this way.”
Encouragement leads to academic career
At the USC Gould School of Law, Clark found the same kind of encouragement from professors who saw her potential as an academician.
“They were the ones who talked to me about the opportunity to go into academia,” she says. “They were the ones who said they saw something in me that they thought would make me a good and exciting professor.”
As a student, Clark was drawn to seminars, like Ron Garet’s course on constitutional law and religious ethics, that required thinking deeply about the law and how it shapes human values and lives. That’s one of the things she loves about teaching law.
“It’s the connection with people around ideas that are exciting and important, getting to think through difficult topics with people who care, and feeling like I’m helping them realize something, whether it’s about the law, about themselves, about people or about how things work on the ground versus in theory,” she says.
“Teaching is always stimulating because I feel like I’m learning as well, that it’s constantly feeding my own curiosity and the recognition that we can only continue to grow if we are continuing to engage and challenge ourselves and never think we are done.”
The USC faculty didn’t just suggest that Clark pursue academia; they also created an opportunity for her to carve a path toward that goal with a post-graduate research fellowship. Professors like Garet, Tom Griffith, Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Shapiro were among those who “helped in a profound way,” she says, as she worked on her job talk, prepared for interviews and built the confidence it takes to succeed.
“It meant the world to me that they took the time to reach out and try to help me envision a future for myself. That, quite frankly, has just been amazing. I feel like I owe this whole journey to them.”
The pursuit of equity and justice
Clark’s work toward addressing the inequities of the health care delivery and financing system began early on. After graduating from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in political science, she did administrative work at a small health care company. She contacted many aspects of the business, communicating with health care providers, meeting patients, handling billing and ensuring compliance in a heavily regulated industry.
“I learned all these ways in which people were experiencing barriers to essential resources, even in a system that in theory was supposed to be set up to provide access.”
Clark also worked for the Legal Assistance Foundation, representing children who were wards of the state in disability claims in her hometown of Chicago.
Then she moved to Southern California and, with health care law on her radar, sought out law schools.
“USC Gould really stood out to me in terms of the personal connections that I was able to make,” she says. “The admissions folks were wonderful. They let me sit in on classes and answered my questions. There were other schools that treated me like a number, like they didn’t have time to talk to me, but with USC it was very much about the attention and care I felt folks paid.”
As a USC Gould student, Clark volunteered with the National Health Law Program, which advocates for increased access to health services for Medi-Cal and uninsured consumers. After graduating with her JD, Order of the Coif, she practiced health care transactional law at Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood. Then she returned to USC to complete a research fellowship and subsequently began her academic career at LLS.
The pursuit of equity and justice became the theme of Clark’s scholarship. In addition to publishing on the role of racial and gender inequality in health policy, she has provided testimony on the way law shapes health care access and quality, assisted legal organizations working to preserve access in underserved communities, and educated the community about national health reform.
Over the years, she has taken various leadership roles in public service that also promote those values, as a board member of the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Foundation; the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California; the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics; and the HIV-AIDS Legal Services Alliance, for whom she was also a volunteer attorney. She also served on the L.A. County Bar Association’s Health Law Section executive committee.
A positive way forward
Clark’s upbringing, along with her lifelong tendency to feel deeply about what she sees happening in the world, inspired her to take on injustice. Her dad, a police officer, and her mom, a public school teacher, went to great lengths to ensure their daughter received a good education at a safer, more diverse school many miles from their home.
“I grew up in Chicago, and it was very segregated,” she says. “I’m so grateful to my dad and my mom because they made everything possible for me. They drove so many hours to make sure I could find spaces that were more integrated and I could see something different — and that took a lot of intention and time, and really a forwarding-thinking approach.”
During those long commutes, her dad shared his vision of a more just world, becoming Clark’s teacher and best friend.
“Every day, we had hours to debate and talk,” she says. “My dad would share things he would see as a police officer. He had a really good way of both helping me understand where there were gaps and problems in equity and justice, and letting me come to my conclusions.”
He steered her toward law school, introducing her to attorneys and judges, taking her to trials and getting her involved in a mock trial program.
“Not only was I aware of certain inequities in life, but by talking about it through a legal lens and helping expose me to the law and people who fought for justice, I was able to also always see a positive way forward and be thinking about the law in that way,” Clark says.
Priorities include support for scholarships
Clark chose LLS as her professional home more than 20 years ago because of the school’s emphasis on academic excellence, promoting social justice and increasing access to education. As dean, those priorities remain her focus.
“Our origin was as an evening law school that created an opportunity for people who had responsibilities, life circumstances, that would not have allowed them to enter the profession the traditional way,” she says. “So much of our social justice mission really is about us being grounded in the community, and embracing and lifting up people who will help reflect the community that need help, making sure they are represented in the legal profession.”
Clark, whose own merit scholarship at USC Gould made a difference in her education, sees scholarships as one way to do that. In her first six months as interim dean, Clark raised over $6.3 million, including $5.74 million for scholarship support. As dean, scholarships are a top fundraising priority, she says.
Clark also plans to support and publicize the law school’s mission of academic excellence with impact, increasing funding for the law school’s clinics and centers.
“We have over 20 law clinics that provide curricular opportunities for our students to learn while actually helping people, helping strengthen communities and changing the law. We have academic centers of excellence, like our Anti-Racism Center and our Coelho Center for Disability Law, Policy and Innovation,” Clark says. “And these are avenues through which students right away learn the power of what it means to have a law degree and also are instilled with a sense of responsibility for using that in a way that moves us toward a more just world.”
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