To:
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Community
From: Dean Daniel
B. Rodriguez
Re:
A historic day for our Law School
Date:
Thursday, October 22
It is my great honor to bring you news of historic significance to our great Law School.
J.B.
Pritzker (JD ’93) and his wife, M.K., through the Pritzker Family Foundation,
have pledged a donation in the amount of $100 million, the largest gift ever to
any law school. This gift propels the amount raised in our Motion to Lead campaign above $190 million—in
just the first year since the campaign’s public launch last September.
To honor
their unprecedented generosity and to recognize the tremendous contributions of
the Pritzker family to the fields of law, business, and public service, the Law
School will henceforth be named the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. As
such, we will join each of Northwestern University’s other professional schools
(Kellogg and Feinberg) with names that recognize transformative benefactors to
our programs.
Let me provide a bit more context on what this gift means for our Law School and legal education as a whole.
In short,
it is a game-changer. A gift of this magnitude opens myriad possibilities and
immediately catapults Northwestern to a position from which we can impact not
only our Law School, but also legal education writ-large in constructive,
profound, and market-demanding ways. Indeed, this gift creates a responsibility
for us to do this. While the gift in and of itself will not get us all of the
way to fulfilling our comprehensive plans, we are now closer than ever before.
Amidst the
systemic and disruptive changes of the past decade, legal education is at a
crossroads. The profession and marketplace require that law schools prepare a
new kind of lawyer—one who is able to navigate and lead complex legal and
policy problems and to work imaginatively at the interface of law, business,
and technology. The challenges we face demand that we break legal education out
of its traditional silo, and bring forward multi-disciplinary programs and
tools to address the growing complexity of our modern world. Spurred by J.B.’s
and M.K.’s remarkable gift along with the generosity of so many others, both in
the past and future, Northwestern is now poised to do just that.
The Pritzker gift will create scholarships for future law students, helping to make a first-rate legal education accessible regardless of a student’s financial circumstances, and assisting us in our efforts to enroll the nation’s top law students.
A
substantial portion of the gift will be used to develop initiatives, curricula,
and projects aimed at developing students and graduates who are creative,
constructive problem-solvers, armed with an entrepreneurial mindset and
multidisciplinary skills and resolutely committed to social justice and the
rule of law. The Pritzker gift will give us the financial foundation to
continue and expand this valuable work.
The gift
will permanently endow and rename the Law School’s Entrepreneurship Law Center after J.B.’s father,
as the Donald Pritzker Entrepreneurial Law Center; fund entrepreneurial and
leadership skill development endeavors; and advance law-business-technology
initiatives, including the Master of Science in Law program for
professionals in scientific, engineering, and medical fields.
The gift will support faculty excellence through endowed professorships. It also will support our ongoing and emerging public interest initiatives in the United States and in key regions throughout the world.
Our reform
efforts thus focus on two main objectives: to make law school more affordable
and to make it more adaptive to the modern world. This gift enables us to make
meaningful progress in both respects. The future has never been brighter for
our esteemed Law School.
The
Pritzkers are longtime Northwestern supporters. They have made gifts to the
University for 16 consecutive years and have been strong supporters of the Law
School’s annual fund. They have supported the Law School’s Center for International Human Rights and the Center on Wrongful Convictions and, fifteen
years ago, the family’s $10 million leadership gift in our prior campaign
established the Pritzker Legal Research Center.
A key
moment in their story hinges to Nicholas J. Pritzker, who arrived in Chicago in
1881 and grew up an immigrant in poverty. His
family believed that education was the key to a better life, and Nicholas, who
eventually put himself through law school, ultimately built a highly successful
law practice. Throughout his life he committed himself and his family to public
service and community purpose. He raised three sons, all of whom followed their
father in obtaining their law degrees and joining the family’s law firm of
Pritzker & Pritzker. Nicholas’ grandson, Donald Pritzker, was the
co-founder and chief executive that built the Hyatt Hotels Corporation into a
global hospitality brand. Three generations after Nicholas Pritzker raised
himself out of poverty, the Pritzker family’s commitment to improving the
communities in which they live has endured. It has become one of the nation’s
most successful business families and owes its success to the study of law and
to entrepreneurship.
M.K.
Pritzker is a director of the Pritzker Family Foundation and serves as a
trustee of the Northwestern Memorial Foundation. She is also founder of the
Evergreen Invitational Foundation, which supports innovative programs and
research studies at Northwestern Memorial Hospital that further explore and
address important women’s health issues.
J.B. Pritzker received his J.D. from Northwestern Law in 1993.
Equal to his philanthropic support has been his strong dedication and
longstanding service to both the Law School and Northwestern University. He is
a life member of the Northwestern Law Board, and he joined the University’s
Board of Trustees in 2004.
J.B. is
co-founder and managing partner of Pritzker Group. The private investment
firm, with offices in Chicago and Los Angeles, comprises three professional
investment teams: middle-market acquisitions, technology venture capital, and
asset management.
He is a
leader in the Chicago entrepreneurship community and has been the key driver in
growing and strengthening the entrepreneurship and technology sectors in the
Midwest. J.B. currently chairs ChicagoNEXT, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s council on
innovation and technology. He founded 1871, Chicago’s digital startup center and
played an important role in the creation of the Illinois Venture Capital Association, the
nation’s top regional private equity association, and the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, the
leading regional advocate for entrepreneurs. He also cofounded Chicago Ventures and funded the startup of Techstars Chicago and Built in Chicago.
J.B. is a
prime example of an individual who has utilized his legal training as a way to
engage with and lead ventures that bridge the legal, business, technology, and
entrepreneurship sectors. As such, attaching the Pritzker family name to our
law school is a perfect match as we forge a path that will do the same—one that
prepares our graduates to leverage these multi-faceted collaborations, to lead
in a dynamic and changing profession and world, to foster solutions that spur
economic growth, to facilitate necessary policy reforms, and to modernize and
expedite the delivery of legal services for all throughout our society.
Please join
me in thanking J.B. and M.K. for their incredible generosity and all of those
throughout our community who have helped make this possible.
We will
soon develop an FAQ page on our website to provide more information about this
gift; I encourage you to read it.
This
morning we held a celebratory event in Thorne Auditorium to commemorate this
transformative occasion. It included remarks by President Schapiro, Board of
Trustees Chair Bill Osborn, J.B. Pritzker, a current student and four of our
faculty, and myself. If you were unable to attend in person, you may view a video recording of this ceremony on our website.
In closing,
I am compelled to restate some language from our Motion to Lead campaign case
statement which is now even more apropos. Indeed, these words fittingly belong
with our Law School, the law school that, through the years, has consistently
pioneered many of the legal academy’s most important and timely advances and
innovations. This is our legacy and now, to an even greater extent, our duty.
