Meet David Leebron President-Elect of Rice University

An academic scholar of the highest order. A person of unquestioned trustworthiness, integrity, and honesty. One who consults widely, listens carefully, and then acts determinedly.

President-Elect David Leebron with wife Y. Ping Sun.

These are just a few of the ways colleagues describe David W. Leebron, the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law and dean of the Columbia Law School and, now, president-elect of Rice University.

Chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees E. William Barnett made the announcement on December 17 after the board voted unanimously in favor of the appointment. Leebron (pronounced LEE-Bron), 48, will serve as the university’s seventh president, succeeding Malcolm Gillis, who steps down on June 30 after 11 years as president of Rice.

“We sought an individual who reflects the maturity and academic stature of Rice at the end of its first century and who had the character and substance to lead the university into its next century,” Barnett said. “We are confident that David is that person.”

Leebron said that he was equally impressed with Rice and Houston. “I feel so privileged to be given the opportunity to help lead an institution of Rice University’s quality. Its outstanding faculty and student body reflect a true dedication to excellence. The combination of Rice’s strengths is really extraordinary. It really is the epitome of the great research university combined with an emphasis on providing the very best undergraduate education.”

A faculty member at Columbia since 1989, Leebron has been dean of its law school since 1996. Faculty members say that administrative responsiveness has increased during his tenure. He has roughly doubled both annual giving and the school’s endowment and has enhanced financial aid and financial support for students who enter public service. Observers say he has recruited the best junior faculty in law anywhere. Under Leebron, the school has maintained a strong commitment to diversity among the faculty generally and in key leadership positions, and that commitment also is reflected in the student body, which is the most diverse among the country’s top law schools. Not only has the school’s student body become more national under his leadership, it now includes a greater percentage of international students than any of its peers.

“I will be sad to leave Columbia Law School, which has been so good to me in every possible way,” Leebron said, “but at the same time, I cannot imagine a more exciting opportunity than this.”

Born and reared in Philadelphia, Leebron was an Eagle Scout and began his lifelong interest in international affairs through a steady stream of exchange students—from Europe, Japan, and Mexico—who stayed with his family, and through his own half-year exchange in Germany. He speaks excellent German, which he put to use as a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Private Law in Hamburg in 1988 and as the Jean Monnet Visiting Professor at Bielefeld University in 1992.

Leebron earned a BA degree, summa cum laude, in history and science from Harvard College in 1976, and his JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1979, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review, one of the nation’s highest honors for a law student.

From Harvard Law, he went to Los Angeles to clerk for Judge Shirley M. Hufstedler at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After a semester as an acting professor at UCLA School of Law, he entered private practice from 1981 to 1983 as an associate at the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. From 1983 to 1989, he was a professor of law at New York University and director of NYU’s International Legal Studies Program.

A member of the bars of New York State, and, although currently inactive, Hawaii and Pennsylvania, he is on the American Bar Association Standards Review Committee and the American Law Deans Association Board of Directors, and he has served on the Association of American Law Schools Committee on Nominations. Additionally, Leebron is a member of the American Law Institute (ex officio), the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of International Law, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the board of directors of the IMAX Corporation, and the editorial board of Foundation Press, an educational publisher. He has taught and published in areas of corporate finance, international economic law, human rights, privacy, and torts and is the co-author of a textbook on human rights. Most recently, he has written about problems in international trade law.

Leebron is married to Y. Ping Sun, who was born in Shanghai and primarily raised by her grandparents in Tianjin during China’s Cultural Revolution. In 1981, she made her first trip outside China to attend Princeton University, where she graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School in 1985. Ping graduated from Columbia Law School in 1988, the year before her future husband arrived there, and went to work for the New York law firm of White & Case. She currently works at the New York office of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP and is described as an extremely positive force with Columbia alumni, faculty, and friends. The couple has two children, Daniel, 7, and Merissa, 4.

—Terry Shepard