Rabbi, lawyer and law professor Aaron Twerski knew “from my second week of law school” at Marquette University that he wanted to be not a trial attorney but a teacher of law.
“I find it exciting, intellectually stimulating; and I love teaching, and I’m told I’m rather good at it,” Twerski said in a telephone interview.
Indeed, many people appear to have thought so — so many that Twerski is now the dean of the Hofstra University School of Law in New York, a position he assumed this past July, some four decades after his revelation at MU.
A Milwaukee-native, Twerski is a brother of Rabbi Michel Twerski of Congregation Beth Jehudah. He apparently is now the first Chasidic Jew ever to head a major U.S. law school.
And he did this after “40 years of hard work” and despite some encounters with religious discrimination, he said.
Twerski told the New York Jewish Week that one law school administrator at Harvard University, where Twerski had served as a teaching fellow in the 1960s, told him outright, “You’re not going to get a teaching job” — and that at another time someone said to him, “Do you have to be so religious?”
Yet he made his way, going first to Duquesne University (1967-71), then Hofstra (1972-86), then Brooklyn Law School (1986-2005), and now back to Hofstra.
Today it is not so unusual to find Orthodox, including Chasidic, attorneys. But Twerski said, “Discrimination is not gone…. The situation is a lot better now, but it’s not gone.”
In addition to teaching, Twerski is also a legal scholar, specializing in product liability law. He finds this “fascinating” because “it’s a combination of personal injury law tied to the ability of markets to perform” and of the “interactions of men and machines.”
“You are faced with the limits of technology and also the vagaries of human conduct,” he said. “People do the darnedest things with products.”
And he acknowledged that some of his fascination might have come from his study of the Talmud, which contains sections devoted to liability law.
“The Talmud has very rich treatment of all forms of personal injury,” Twerski said. And the problems are very similar. “Humans have not changed in a couple of thousand years. The setting changes, but human beings don’t.”
Twerski emphasized that he was hired to be “the dean, not the rabbi” of the Hofstra law school. Nevertheless, “I bring to whatever I do a certain view of life. It has to influence me and it does.”
And it may exert some influence on his plans for the school. For example, Twerski said Hofstra is going to create a master’s program in family law, a field he says is “terribly important,” but is “underemphasized in U.S. law schools, and wrongfully so.”
Above all, he “would like students to understand that they are in a special profession, that they hold the fortunes of people in their hands, and that law is a calling and not a job,” he said. “If students leave with that, then I will believe I have done a good job.”
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