Duke law professor Katharine T. Bartlett, an award-winning scholar and teacher, has been selected to be the new dean of the Duke School of Law, Provost Peter Lange announced Dec. 21.

Her appointment is subject to formal approval by the university Board of Trustees in February. She succeeds Pamela Gann, who left this summer to become president of Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts college in California.

"The combination of Professor Bartlett's fine legal scholarship and her strong law school and university experience highly recommended her for the dean's position," Lange said. "Kate will provide superb leadership in this important moment in the development of our law school and university."

Bartlett, the A. Kenneth Pye professor of law, has taught at Duke since 1979. She said the law school is "in strong shape, with an excellent student body, a world-class faculty and a small but growing and strongly committed alumni base. I hope to help maintain the school's high across-the-board quality, while guiding the process of identifying and building special strengths in areas of particular importance in the next century."

Bartlett said these included, among other things, international and comparative law, intellectual property, interdisciplinary studies, environmental law, alternative dispute resolution, and issues pertaining to science and technology.

She added that she would like to see the law school play a leading role in improving standards of legal professionalism, public perceptions of lawyers and public awareness of the importance of law to this society. "I look forward to working with my faculty colleagues and students at the law school, as well as the larger Duke community, in developing and achieving these goals," she said.

Acting law school dean Clark Havighurst said Bartlett is becoming dean at an important time for the law school. "There are few people as qualified as Kate Bartlett to lead the school through the crucially important faculty development process that lies immediately ahead, as several new faculty positions as well as some upcoming retirement vacancies must be filled," he said.

Bartlett, 52, was selected as the law school's 12th dean after a five-month national search. She has written and lectured extensively on topics in family law, including child custody, joint custody, surrogate parenting and the role of fault in divorce law. Her article on non-exclusive parenthood published in the Virginia Law Review in 1984 is widely considered to be the leading article relating to issues of parenthood when the law's premise of the nuclear family has failed.

She is also an expert in the law as it relates to women, and has published articles on gender theory, employment law, theories of social change and legal education. Her article on feminist legal methods, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1990, is one of the most often cited law review articles of the last decade.

She is co-author, with Angela Harris, of a leading casebook, Gender and Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary (1998) and co-editor of a book of edited readings in feminist legal theory.

In 1994, she won the University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award at Duke.

"I think of her as the complete law professor," Gann said. "She has succeeded in teaching, scholarship, collegiality and leadership."

Gann also noted that Duke is, to her knowledge, the first top law school to have "female deans back to back. I think that makes Duke law stand out as a receptive place for female students, faculty and administrators."

Currently, Bartlett serves in the prestigious position of co-reporter for the American Law Institute's Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, a model family law code, for which she is responsible for the provisions relating to child custody. In 1998, she was honored as the Justice R. Ammi Cutter Reporter for her work on this project.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Geoffrey Hazard, director emeritus of the American Law Institute, said Bartlett has a "very good analytic mind, is very well-informed ... and is a very good listener who is able to absorb criticisms and suggestions. She's very, very good, and I'm sure she'll be an excellent dean."

Bartlett grew up on a small family farm in North Guilford, Conn., where as a girl she cleaned stables, milked cows and collected maple sap. "I was often the object of lighthearted ribbing," she said in a 1992 essay, "because I was not quite as practical as most of the rest of my family."

She earned her bachelor degree at Wheaton College, her master's at Harvard University and her law degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Before coming to Duke, she was a law clerk on the California Supreme Court, and a legal services attorney in Oakland, where she specialized in disability law and pension issues. She has been a visiting professor at UCLA and at Boston University, and a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

She also has been active in the Durham community, serving on the board of directors of the Urban Ministries Center of Durham since 1991 and the board of directors of the Durham County Department of Social Services, raising money for the Triangle United Way, and serving on numerous boards and committees as a member of Pilgrim United Church of Christ.

She is married to Duke law professor Chris Schroeder, a scholar whose work spans environmental law, administrative law and a number of other public law topics, and who has served at high level government positions in the U.S. Senate and the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. They have three children.