Jason Nance has a deep and abiding commitment to research.
Even as he was announced as the new dean of Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, he was conducting field research on the elasticity of supply-and-demand on a non-fungible, geo-specific real property market in the throes of inflation.
In other words: He was house hunting in Dallas.
“It’s an interesting market,” Nance deadpanned diplomatically during a brief break in the hunt.
Cracking the code on an overheated Dallas real estate space may not be Nance’s most important research project to date, but it is easily his most urgent. He is scheduled to begin his new gig Aug. 10. And to do what he hopes to do — what he feels confident he can do — will require his immediate attention.
Currently Dedman is among five law schools tied at 58 in the U.S. News & World Report’s most recent rankings. Two of the other four, Baylor and the University of Houston, are in Texas. The others are in Michigan (Wayne State) and Pennsylvania (Penn State). Nance’s job, which he is not reluctant to acknowledge, is to move SMU up the U.S. News ranking ladder.
“There’s a great foundation already,” said Nance. “It’s a high-functioning, academically attuned environment. It’s a great opportunity, and I think I’m a good fit for this position.”
Nance leaves a position at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law as the associate dean of research and faculty development. During his tenure at Florida, which stretches back to 2011, Levin catapulted from 48 to 21 in the U.S. News rankings, an extraordinary arc of success by any measure.
“I understand that process,” Nance said bluntly.
The program Nance has in mind for SMU is deceptively simple: To create a school that attracts those “high-functioning, academically attuned” students for the chance to work with a faculty that can help them become highly credentialed, highly attractive lawyers — leaders — particularly in the corporate setting.
Although that sounds pretty much like the school’s current mission, it’s the purer academic approach — as he describes it — that will make the pieces fit, particularly in his own sphere of passion: research, and particularly quantitative research.
“I have a deep appreciation for research,” Nance said. “And in my own research and writing I’ve often employed quantitative methodologies. I’m a great believer in the data-driven, empirical approach.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that Nance began his education career as a teacher in the Aldine Independent School District in North Houston. Between 1996 and 1999, after graduating from Brigham Young University in history with a minor in math education, he taught math at Stovall Middle School. On weekends, he also taught GED preparation classes and and English as a second language to adults at a local community college. It was during that time that he became interested in becoming a school administrator — a school principal or, ultimately, a superintendent.
Toward that end, he began graduate studies at The Ohio State University, ultimately earning a Ph.D. in Educational Administration. It was there, while studying the legal issues familiar to special education programs, and public education in general, that he began flirting with the idea of becoming a lawyer.
“I really loved those classes — and that’s when I first considered applying to law school,” Nance said. His Ph.D. at OSU was followed by a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
But what could have been a familiar path to a pro forma legal career was cut short by his enduring interest in legal education.
Nance clerked for U.S. Third Circuit Judge Kent Jordan in Wilmington, Delaware, which was followed by a three-year stint as a litigation associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. When his residual love for education continued to eclipse the Big Law experience, he signed on to teach torts for a semester as a visiting professor at Villanova. But times had changed along with many state legislatures, and teaching torts didn’t seem to offer the intellectual challenge — or the professional opportunity — Nance craved.
“There wasn’t much of a market at that time,” Nance said.
He landed at the University of Florida as an assistant professor that his education and legal credentials truly merged, and the nexus of that merger was a history of quantitative research.
His academic writing has covered a wide range of education issues and policies, many of them pertaining to the legal implications of school policies on students in general and students of color in particular: school liability under state sexual abuse reporting laws; random, suspicionless searches of student belongings; school security after the Newton massacre; the role of implicit bias in student surveillance — to note a few.
Moreover, he was a reporter for the American Bar Association’s Joint Task Force on Reversing the School-to-Prison Pipeline, co-authoring its critical and quantitative review of the long-term effects of an increased legalization of school disciplinary actions. It’s an issue he’s written extensively about in a series of papers published during his term at Florida. Several more papers with collaborator Michael Heise, a professor at Cornell Law School, are scheduled for publication this year.
But it is his vision to apply a bent for empirical research to the usual constitutional construct of legal education that got him the job. Nance wants to produce students who can a apply data-based approach, not only to their future law practice, but to the business of that practice as well. He wants students who are comfortable, not only with the role of precedent in their legal training, but the growing presence of artificial intelligence and data-driven analyses in the actual practice of law.
“Courts and lawyers are trained to make good decisions, and they generally do,” Nance said. “But empirical research can help make those decisions better and helps elevate an academic program.”
“Lawyers can play a role in data management on a variety of issues: privacy, regulation, e-discovery. We want to teach them how data can be used in their representation of clients,” Nance said.
His approach to music to Mike Boone’s ears. Boone, a founder of Haynes and Boone and a member of the search committee, sees a pragmatism attached to Nance’s academic bent.
“It’s easy to get stuck in the ‘same-old, same-old,'” Boone said. “We want to produce lawyers who are entrepreneurial in their approach to the business. Our clients are entrepreneurial, and the law business needs to be entrepreneurial as well. We need to be meeting what the market needs, and we can do a much better job of that.”
Nance says his approach is particularly appropriate at this for the moment, but it is also particularly challenging during a time when higher education in general is under assault for not providing a value to justify rising tuition costs.
“We want to make sure there is confidence in the return-on-investment we provide,” Nance said. “But we can do that by producing students who know how to think empirically, how to utilize technology thoughtfully, but most of all how to think critically.”
And for Nance, the key to all of that — like finding a house in Dallas — is research.