Stanford Law School (SLS) announced the launch of the Sally B. and William H. Neukom Center for the Rule of Law in late October, an endeavor funded by donations from SLS alum William Neukom ’67 and his wife Sally Neukom.
The Center will begin academic research and teaching in 2023 about issues related to rule of law, from accessible justice to civic education. Students and faculty in the Center will collaborate with the World Justice Project (WJP), an international non-profit created to advance the rule of law, of which Neukom is the CEO, and the Wright Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities, a center at Dartmouth University that focuses on the role of computation in government. The Center will also eventually sponsor an annual research consortium, lecture series, graduate research and policy labs, according to SLS spokesperson Stephanie Ashe.
“The Rule of Law Program has had a 23-year history at Stanford and it’s actually, in some ways, poetic because the funding has come full circle,” said law lecturer Erik Jensen, who directs the Rule of Law Program. Jensen called the creation of the Center a “critical expansion” with “more diverse activity” and additional faculty and staff.
Neukom has worked at Stanford as a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council at SLS and served on the board of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Before that, he was a lawyer for Microsoft until 2002, after which he served as the CEO of the San Francisco Giants from 2008 to 2011. The William H. Neukom Building, located at 555 Nathan Abbott Way, was dedicated to Neukom in 2011.
“The rule of law is a system of laws, institutions, norms and community support, which delivers accountability, just laws, open government and accessible justice,” William Neukom told The Daily. “We have been working on that definition for 15 years at the [World Justice] Project.”
