completed, a new building open, and an
excellent faculty and student body in place,
Villanova School of Law is well-positioned.
”
Doris DelTosto Brogan, j.d.
ACTING DEAN, VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW
“An acting dean must strike a delicate
balance—ensuring that the law school
continues to flourish and move forward, while
respecting the fact that she holds an interim
position,” Acting Dean Doris Del Tosto Brogan
observes. Fortunately, Villanova School of Law
is well-positioned for this, with a successful
capital campaign just completed, a new
building open, and an excellent faculty and
student body in place.
Brogan plans to strengthen the momentum the
school has gathered in recent years, including
continuing a major faculty initiative to reshape
the curriculum. “The curriculum is distinctly a
faculty matter,” Brogan notes. “The dean
provides leadership, but primarily by getting
behind the faculty and supporting their ideas
and decisions.”
Brogan may be new to her deanship, but she
is a strong and familiar presence on the
Villanova campus. She earned her J.D. from
Villanova, practiced at Morgan, Lewis &
Bockius and returned to serve as a professor
of law at Villanova for 26 years. She has been
the school’s associate dean since 1992.
Interestingly, Brogan did not really consider
a career in law when she was growing up.
She attended Rowan University to study
journalism and communications. By the 1970s,
Brogan was a self-described hippie and anti-establishment editor-in-chief of the student
newspaper. She knew how to push the limits
when writing about social justice issues, but to
her surprise, she was never told that she could
not publish a piece.
It was then that an epiphany came.
She was allowed to criticize government
policies, and her state-funded school—rather
than refusing to allow her to publish — would
actually pay for it. According to Brogan, such
freedom of speech, protected by law, was part
of the “miraculous experiment in democracy,”
upon which the United States was founded.
Today, Brogan’s passion for the law remains
strong. Her teaching and scholarship focus
on conflict of laws and domestic abuse. When
she was a managing editor of the Villanova
Law Review, Brogan published an article
analyzing battered woman syndrome, one of
the earliest to call for reform in the legal
system’s response to domestic abuse. As a
“rookie professor,” she developed her
expertise in conflict of laws, which deals with
the issues that arise when matters involve
more than one state or country. It touches all
substantive areas of law and has increasing
importance in a globalized economy.
Brogan and her husband, Jim—also a
graduate of Villanova School of Law and the
managing partner of DLA Piper’s Philadelphia
office—have three children: a son, who is a
first-year law student; and two daughters, one
in college and one in fourth grade. Add two
dogs to the mix, and life is busy. “Our family
has always had an important anchor, though,”
Brogan says. “We have dinner together just
about every night. Sometimes it’s a little late,
but spending time together as a family around
the dinner table is nonnegotiable.”
