It was a privilege today to attend the lunch of the Section on Student Services at the Association of American Law Schools’ annual meeting. For our colleague, Professor Peter K. Rofes, received the section’s Peter N. Kutulakis Award. This award recognizes the outstanding contributions of an institution, administrator, or law professor in the provision of services to law students. Our Associate Dean for Administration, Bonnie M. Thomson, nominated Professor Rofes for the Kutulakis Award, and Professor Rofes richly deserves it.

Permit me to repeat what I said a year ago concerning Prof. Rofes. The context was my reporting to students, in my beginning-of-semester letter, that Prof. Rofes had elected to return this academic year to full-time faculty duties, in the tradition of the Law School, after lengthy service as director of the part-time program and associate dean for academic affairs. I wished to explain “my thanks and admiration”:

I have been especially impressed by Prof. Rofes’s ability—even while administering the academic program, including determining course offerings, working with full-time and adjunct faculty, overseeing the schedule, and running the Academic Support Program—never to lose sight of the individuals with whom he works and never to fail to make time, for example, for the individual in need of time, attention, or assistance. There is a lesson for you in his work. For your work as a lawyer also will be in support and service of others; indeed, the work of the lawyer inheres most basically in the attention to and care for another. I express at graduation my hope that you have found some models in these, your early days in the profession. You—we—would do well especially to consider the important ways in which Prof. Rofes is an exemplar.

Congratulations, Peter—and thank you.