During listening sessions held by Interim President Lori Gonzalez last fall, law school faculty, staff and students expressed the qualities they wanted in a new dean, and Gonzalez said Jacobs possesses all of them.

“We are excited Melanie has chosen to join the University of Louisville,” Gonzalez said. “She is experienced and well versed in the academic and administrative aspects of a law school. She has a history of championing diversity, equity and inclusion and is a strong advocate of the needs of students, faculty and staff.”

Jacobs is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in family law. Her scholarship advocates for legal recognition of non-traditional families and changes to the traditional establishment of parent-child relationships due to the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies. Her work has been featured in nearly a dozen law reviews including the Buffalo Law Review, Arizona State Law Journal and Yale Journal of Law & Feminism.

Jacobs is part of the Feminists Judgments Project in which she has submissions in “Reproductive Justice Rewritten,” “Family Law Rewritten” and “Trusts & Estates Rewritten,” all published by Cambridge University Press.

Jacobs joined Michigan State’s College of Law faculty in 2002 and served as interim dean from January 2020 to June 2021. She also served appointments as senior associate dean for academic affairs, senior associate dean/chief of staff, senior associate dean for admissions and international programs and associate dean for graduate and international programs. She has served on numerous advisory committees at Michigan State and is the former chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Family and Juvenile Law Section.

Prior to joining Michigan State, Jacobs served as a Freedman Fellow and a lecturer in law at Temple University School of Law. Her additional teaching experience includes two years as a clinical instructor for the Hale & Dorr Legal Services Center, now known as the WilmerHale Legal Services Center, at Harvard Law School and as an adjunct instructor at the Boston University School of Law. She also held visiting appointments at Marshall-Wythe School of Law in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

Jacobs received her AB from Columbia College in New York City, her JD from Boston University, and her LLM from Temple University. She is admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.

“I am thrilled and privileged to serve as the next dean of the Brandeis School of Law,” Jacobs said. “Brandeis Law has a rich tradition of public service and I look forward to working with the outstanding faculty, staff, students, alumni and our community partners to continue to build on Justice Brandeis’ extraordinary legacy. 

“Consistent with Justice Brandeis’ predilection for innovation and interdisciplinary studies, I am excited to explore new curricular initiatives that will ensure our law students are well prepared for 21st century lawyering, including building programs with other Louisville deans and expanding interdisciplinary opportunities.”

From that moment on, Abrams’ students are immersed in a semester-long simulation of divorce proceedings.

“It’s messy. It’s emotional. We’re unsure what we’re going to do about it — but that’s how an actual client intake would go,” Abrams says.

Thanks to a Wyatt Faculty Development Award promoting innovation in teaching, Abrams was able to style her family law class as a “flipped classroom” three years ago. Unlike traditional law school classes, which emphasize readings and discussion, a flipped classroom focuses on hands-on skills building. The goal is to produce graduates who are practice-ready and is in line with the American Bar Association’s requirement of six hours of experiential learning.

The class is divided into two sections, each representing a spouse in the case. They discuss seven different issues throughout the semester, including child custody and child support.

Collaboration and analysis are major parts of the course, and those skills take time to build. Abrams has found she must strip the course down to the essentials of family lawyering.

“I do more with less content,” she says. “But they move to a higher level of mastery of those concepts.”

And Abrams has had to reframe the classroom experience in other ways — it’s very hard for students to multitask in this class, and it’s difficult to make up for missed sessions. But because the lessons are so intensive, students can view them as study sessions as well as lessons.

The flipped classroom has gotten positive feedback from students, who report feeling more prepared to take the bar exam because of their hands-on experience.

Students get feedback on the performance three times a semester, giving them opportunities to grow throughout the class. In the final exam, they must cover the seven topics for a new client using the skills they’ve built in the previous months.

And the final exam results?

“Stellar,” Abrams says. “They’re not spewing out abstract concepts — they’re lawyering.”

Without the flipped classroom, it’s entirely possible that family law students could leave law school having exclusively read appellate opinions with no idea of the human elements at play in a case.

“Students might know what the law says, but not what the client wants,” Abrams says. “It gives them a chance to see what family law is like on a daily basis.”

This article originally ran in the July 2016 issue of Bar Briefs.

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