Frank and Marcia Carlucci Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and vice president of Innovation at the RAND Corporation.

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A career in the legal field is all about taking a life-long journey of learning and expanding your horizons. This episode's guest greatly knows this to be true, having been through various corners in the field, both in and outside the academic setting. MC Sungaila interviews Dean Nancy Staudt. She is the Frank and Marcia Carlucci Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and Vice President of Innovation at the RAND Corporation. She is also a nationally recognized scholar in tax, tax policy, and empirical legal studies. Here, Dean Nancy Staudt takes us across her journey–from the formative clerkship experience to the challenges she faced in her deanship. She then offers some great advice on taking on a leadership role, highlighting the importance of taking care of oneself as well as having that willingness to learn as you figure out the next step in your career. So don't miss out on this conversation, and allow Dean Nancy Staudt's wisdom to guide you in this journey.  

Relevant episode links:

Pardee RAND Graduate School , RAND Corporation , Professor Lyrissa Lidsky – Past Episode , Michelle Hanlon – Past Episode , Space Law Program , LL.M. Program 

About Nancy Staudt:

Nancy Staudt is the Frank and Marcia Carlucci Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and vice president of Innovation at the RAND Corporation.

A nationally recognized scholar in tax, tax policy, and empirical legal studies, Staudt previously served as the dean and Howard and Caroline Cayne Distinguished Professor at Washington University School of Law. During her tenure, the law school moved up in its ranking, becoming #16 in the country. Staudt raised over $100 million to increase scholarships for students, extend the school’s clinical and experiential programming, and expand the number of named professorships.

Staudt is lauded for her efforts to advance diversity and promote a more inclusive campus environment at Washington University. She coedited The Crisis of Race in Higher Education in 2017, a collection of writings devoted to the issue of access, bias, and opportunity in university settings, and helped launch a statewide task force on racial justice.

Prior to Washington University, Staudt was vice dean for faculty and academic affairs at the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California (USC) and was the inaugural holder of the Edward G. Lewis Chair in Law and Public Policy. She also served as the founding codirector of USC’s Schwarzenegger Institute of State and Global Policy.

She is the author or coauthor of a number of books and articles in leading journals and university presses.

Staudt holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, a J.D. from the University of Minnesota, and a B.A. from Ohio State University.

In this episode, I'm pleased to have the new Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School and Vice President of Innovation at RAND, Nancy Staudt, joined the show. I'm excited because she has deep experience in traditional legal academia but also has a role at a truly unique institution in the world at Pardee RAND in terms of its connection with RAND itself and the real-world work that its public policy students engage in. Welcome, Nancy. 

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. 

Thank you so much for joining. I'm a long-time fan of RAND since I started in the law working on appellate cases. I would always go to the RAND site for research studies that were helpful or illuminating for cases I was working on. I've had the true pleasure of serving and chairing the RAND ICJ Advisory Board. It's an institution close to my heart. 

I'm so glad to have you here and be able to share even with four people the good stuff that RAND is doing and the deep work that it does. I always start first in terms of finding out how it was that you found your way into the law or decided that you might want to study the law. How did that come about for you? 

Thank you for asking. I had an unusual track into the law. When I was younger, I thought maybe I'd want to be a lawyer. I didn't know any lawyers. When I went to undergraduate school, I fell in love with economics. I thought I might get a PhD in Economics but my advisors said, “There are not a lot of jobs in economics. Why don't you think again?” 

As I was thinking, I ended up being a paralegal in a DC law firm and fell in love with the work, the vision, the people and the clients. I thought, “I want to be a lawyer.” It was that easy. Right from that paralegal position, I went off to law school and after that, I went off to practice law. I've loved the decision ever since. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. 

It can be hard when you don't know a lawyer or don't have any lawyers in the family. When you come up with the idea, at least you had an experience where you're like, “I like what you can do in the law. I had no one in the family but I came up with it myself. I don't know where it came from.” That's a good admonition if you don't have someone or know what it might mean to be a lawyer to go out, investigate and take a position like that to see if that's something you might be interested in. 

I'm always so impressed with students who are first-gen students and students who don't have any experience with anybody who's a lawyer on any part of their family. For me, candidly though, between the time I was originally thinking about being a lawyer and didn't know anybody, at the time I decided to be a lawyer, two of my other siblings decided to be lawyers. It almost became a family plan. We have three lawyers in my family but I hear what you're saying. I'm so impressed with students and people who think about different careers, even though they don't have any experience with those careers. 

Did you have an idea of what you might want to do in the law or throughout law school? Did you have some idea that you might want to end up teaching?

Don't worry about your grades; just worry about your passion. 

I had no idea that I would want to go to the university. When I went to law school, I didn't even know what area I wanted to practice. Subsequently, I've realized a lot of students come to law school having a firm idea of what they want to do. Some have a little bit of a sense of an idea and others, none at all, which is me. What I discovered over the course of many years at the university, students always changed around. Even if they come planning on X, they might move to Y. People who don't have any idea ended up finding an amazing commitment to a certain area. 

For me, I had no idea. I took classes I liked and followed professors with whom I was inspired. Eventually, I discovered that I was taking a lot of business-oriented classes and tax classes, even though the worst grade I got in law school was in corporate tax. Eventually, I went off to be a corporate tax lawyer. That goes to show you that don't worry about your grades. Worry about your passion. I went off to be a tax lawyer and I loved it. 

There is a connection there if you were originally interested in economics. There's a link to the tax but what intrigued you about working in the tax law area? 

You're right. There is such a great link there. It's so obvious when you say it but I hadn't put those pieces together before. I've had this long-lasting interest in economics, finance and tax. What I like about that area of study is it's very fluid. You can find policies and plans that are driven by a big vision of how countries should operate. Like how much should citizens give back in the form of their revenue and labor to the greater social good? 

There's no one answer to that. There are big huge questions in this area. At the same time, especially in tax, there is a lot of precision. The tax code is a very long document. To some questions, there are answers. Being a law student, I loved finding actual answers to real questions but at the same time, I felt enamored by the big questions that had no clear answer but were driven by policy perspectives. Citizens and individuals could opine on them and have their views and challenge what legislators and decision-makers were doing. It was that combination that made me fall in love with tax. 

It does have that combination. There's a certain level of certainty with regard to how the code operates in some areas but then there are those bigger questions and how tax policy changes. The tax law itself might change but it's usually tied to some pretty large societal policy issues. It may even have impacts on a large society-wide basis that maybe people didn't anticipate studying. It does have a combination of both. I hadn't thought of that before but it does. 

Every provision in the tax code is driven by a bigger policy. When we subsidize electric cars, give child credits or decide what to leave untaxed, what to tax and what to subsidize, all of that is driven by legislators’ big vision of what our society should look like. 

Your experience with that aspect of tax law put you in a very good position to be where you are in terms of the Pardee RAND School and the policy work, which is very wide-ranging that its graduates engage in and its students as well. 

There are so many tax questions that PhD students can study. At the Pardee RAND Graduate School, we named the school after Fred Pardee who gave us a generous gift. Some students are studying tax issues and trying to think of new ways to answer old and abiding questions. There is so much work to be done in this area. While I haven't spent enough time with the new tax bill that's emerging from Congress, a lot is going on in DC. When you look at Elizabeth Warren, it was all over the news talking about her vision of how corporations should pay more taxes. That's a view on how society should operate. We can appreciate her view or disagree with the view but it's a vision. 

You decided to go into corporate tax. Was that outside the academic setting that you practiced or worked in the tax area? 

I did. I practice taxed in a San Francisco firm for several years. First, after law school, I clerked on the Ninth Circuit. I know you've had experience with the Ninth Circuit too. I then worked for several years in a San Francisco firm and jumped over to the academy. 

Let's back up a little bit in terms of the clerkship too. It's so formative in my experience and it is for many who clerk and what's involved in a clerkship or what was involved for you and the relationship. What I'm interested in is that I don't know what people appreciate so much. Not just the training that you get from the clerkship and the behind-the-scenes understanding of how the court operates, which you would never otherwise have the opportunity to get but also the relationship with the judge that you work with and the group of clerks that you clerk with in terms of long-standing mentoring and support that can come from that. I'm curious about what your experience was in that regard and how the clerks have impacted your career. 

I had an amazing experience with my judge. He was Judge John Noonan. Sadly, he passed away but it was such an amazing experience to go from studying the law and reading these cases to having insight and impact on what new opinions would look like. Learning how the court operates behind the scenes and working together with a small group of people to think about some of the most important issues of the day that landed in the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, like where I was, was amazingly inspiring. 

I also learned the incredible importance of collaboration. I had two other amazing clerks. We helped each other out all the time and answered each other's questions. The clerks that I met, both in the chambers and outside of the chambers and other students and clerks who were working for other judges, I wouldn't say they were close lifelong friends but I have a whole orbit of clerk friends whom we call on each other for help. 

It could be anything from, “What do you think about a certain university for my student? I'm starting a new nonprofit. I'm having this issue. Do you want to get together for a clerks’ reunion?” What an incredible collection of friends that I made in that one single year. Also, my clerkship being at the appellate level allowed me to take a lot of time to study issues and think about what our decisions meant for the development of law and policy. That got me interested in thinking about other big issues beyond being a practicing tax lawyer. 

It started me thinking down the road of, “Perhaps, one day being a professor.” I had never thought about being a professor ever until I met Judge Noonan. Judge Noonan was a professor for twenty years at Berkeley Law School. He brought a certain mindset and I learned from that mindset. We used to talk about books. I would talk about the feminist literature I was reading and he would talk about the great novels he was reading. It was an amazing experience. I loved it. As you can see from my tone of voice, I'm still excited. 

It is special. That's why I invited you to talk about it because when people talk about their experience in clerking, that comes out. If it was particularly formative and joyful as you're relaying, that comes out. I don't know that's something people and even law students can say, “There are clerkships. There's this and that. It's helpful for various things.” You meet all of these people like fellow clerks who remain fellow travelers throughout your career but none of that captures the joy and warmth that you're showing. 

That is true for so many of us about the clerkship experience. It's such a marvelous eye-opener in so many ways. When you were talking about Judge Noonan, I thought of Judge Dorothy Nelson as well. It was the same story of so many of her clerks going on to teach and become professors because of her time at USC, as one of the first woman deans of a law school. Some judges are on certain predilections and they can inspire their clerks from their experiences too. 

Literally, every provision in the tax code is driven by a bigger policy.

Yes, I agree. 

Thanks for being so open and sharing what that meant to you as well. It was also formative in terms of you considering something you hadn't before, opening your mind to the possibility of teaching. There are a lot of seeds that are placed from the courtship. Sometimes, we can't always trace them. Sometimes you can. 

I never thought about being an appellate lawyer. I didn't know there was such a thing. Even when I was clerking, I didn't know that you could do that but I certainly enjoyed the work at the appellate courts. Having that experience, I knew later on that was the seed. I said, “I would like that.” The question is, “Would I be good at it? Can you only do that? Yes, you can.” It all fits together. 

In law schools, we don't talk much about being an appellate lawyer or a trial lawyer. It's more like, “Are you going into private practice, nonprofit, government, teaching, substantive tax or bankruptcy?” You're right. That is an interesting piece of the puzzle that perhaps we could do better when we think and talk about careers inside law schools. 

As we discuss, one of the things I was thinking or hoping about from the show is that it exposes people to a whole variety of people who have lived experiences in many different ways. It may not be something you hear about when you're in law school or from career services because they're evolutions of a career and how all of the things fit together. That's one of the things that I see. 

One of the common threads is that, at the time, you're making decision after decision but in retrospect, when you look at all of it, you say, “All of this fits together. It makes sense in retrospect that all of these different things that I learned along the way or I found I enjoyed along the way fit together into this perfect puzzle. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing because of my various skills and things like that.” 

Having that seed of teaching planted from the clerkship, having the interest and the big issues from the appellate clerkship and also thinking about tax law from a very broad policy perspective, all of that seems to lead to your next two phases, which are teaching in law schools and then coming to RAND, which focused on so many different policy issues. 

It isn't even necessarily true that the Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School is necessarily a lawyer or has a legal background. There could be many other backgrounds. It takes a special lawyer or a law school professor with a special interest in the policy questions to come to where you are. It's neat listening to you and all the different pieces of the threads. I'm like, “That goes with that. All fits together down the line.”  

You went to go teach where you were teaching tax law and I assume other kinds of law as well because usually, they want you to teach different areas like first-year classes. How did you enjoy teaching? You went on to a leadership position as well. Whatever you'd like to talk about in terms of your law school teaching and deanship. 

When I jumped over from private practice to teaching, I was lucky. I was invited to teach all tax classes. I've dabbled in a few other classes, especially after I got a PhD in Quantitative Public Policy. I've taught in policy schools as well. That expanded my horizons in terms of the type of classes that were law-related that I teach. Inside the law school, I was focused on income tax, corporate tax and tax policy for my entire career and I loved it. 

That’s so weird because you were like, “No.” That's so rare. Usually, you got to teach the other fundamental classes as well as the tax. That’s great. 

I don't know if I was lucky or disadvantaged. It depends on your perspective. On the one hand, it allowed me to perfect my approach to teaching, learn new ideas and understand tax in a deeply profound way. On the other hand, it may be clipped my wings a little if I wasn't able to engage the law students on other topics as well. I'm not sure how to think about that but it worked for me. I enjoyed teaching the students. 

I taught at several different law schools and eventually, I started thinking about administration. I first had a Vice Deanship but simultaneously, I took on the role of Director of the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. Arnold Schwarzenegger had launched a new center at the University of Southern California. 

I had joint roles in the law school and in the center, which happened to be located in the Price School of Public Policy at USC. When I started my administrative work, I had a foot in both public policy and law. I then found that I loved it. I loved solving problems, thinking about bigger institutional questions and seeing how the whole curriculum fit together and advance the mission to educate the next generation of lawyers and leaders. I decided to continue my administrative focus and went off to be the Dean at Washington University School of Law for about seven years and then jumped over to the Pardee RAND Graduate School at the RAND Corporation. 

One of my friends who also was a guest on the show, Professor Lyrissa Lidsky, was an expert in first amendment law but also stepped down as Dean of a law school as well. Teaching and being a Dean are different. You have leadership in so many other realms. You have to raise money. You’re not just concerned about your students and tax law classes anymore. It's much broader support for the institution. What things do you think to make a good law school dean? What other things surprised you about the deanship that you didn't realize you would be called upon to do? 

I know former Dean Lyrissa Lidsky. What a wonderful person. She's amazing. I'm glad that you had her on your show. I need to go and dig up that version. 

She is an amazing person. That fits in with the clerkship thing. She and I clerked on the Ninth Circuit at the same time with different judges and locations but that's how we met. 

I very much agree with her. Being a professor, you're focused on the big and important questions associated with teaching the students, preparing them for practice, also writing articles and doing research and committee work. When I think of administrative work, sometimes I conceptualized it as a giant committee assignment because you can still do some teaching and writing but you can't do as much as when you're a professor. 

Everybody has to figure out when they want to try a new adventure and what their goals are.

When I was a Dean at Wash U., we had such a thick collection of tax professors. I didn't want to come in and take their classes. I did some writing and research but I didn't teach when I was at Wash U. You have to choose when you're in administration because you're representing the whole institution and so many different stakeholders, students, faculty, staff and alumni. You're the face of the institution. 

When you go out in public, you're speaking sometimes with legislators, your co-deans and the president or chancellor of the university. There is so much work to do, including making sure your budget balances, you have an amazing faculty who are prepared to teach the students and enroll a student body. No students, no school. There is so much more that you have to think about and so many more moving parts. 

Much depends on a great team like working collaboratively with the faculty members to have the best curriculum, with friends and alumni to fundraise and with your co-deans, both inside universities and outside the universities on new initiatives and innovations. There's so much more to think about. I felt inspired by that bigger portfolio but others feel much more inspired by the work of a faculty member researching, writing and teaching. 

The point you touched on as well can be an issue in terms of the point in your career when you do have a leadership role in the administration and what it calls you to do. I've had friends not in the law but in other graduate institutions who are great leaders and were called upon to vice deanships or a deanship of a school very early in their careers. 

Some of them backed off of doing that in favor of doing it later because they wouldn't be able to devote the time they wanted to their publishing and academic pursuits. There is that trade-off in terms of timing for it in your career but it also allows you to flex a lot of muscles and grow. None of those things are things you have to deal with as a law professor. It’s your job as a dean. 

Everybody has to figure out when they want to try a new adventure and what their goals are. Some people might want to jump into administration earlier. Some people might think, “I have so much more to say. I have so many more articles and books to write. I have so many more students to teach. I might want to do it but not yet.” 

I agree that we have to always think about what our short-term goals and long-term goals are. Think about them simultaneously as our career unfolds. It's a marathon. We have to take time out for ourselves too because in the long run, if we're healthy, positive and feel good, we'll achieve our goals. We have to make sure we take some time for ourselves and not just think all the time about our careers. 

That's a good piece of advice as well. It can be hard when you're laser-focused on achieving certain things to do. If you're not well powered to do that, then it's not going to work out as well. I do admire people like you and Lyrissa who go into teaching for that depth of knowledge and sharing it with the students and the publishing, all of the deep thought and work that goes into that but then have a willingness to explore other skills that they might have and to grow and take on new adventures, which takes on a leadership role and particularly a deanship role requires. 

I didn't know what I was doing when I took on my first deanship role. Candidly, I thought I hope I can do this. Am I the right person? That's natural to think. We should have confidence once we've had experience. Everybody has to be new when they first step into a new job. Every single person is new to the job. Take a few risks and sometimes it works. Sometimes you realize, “No, that was a mistake. I'll go back to something else.” It's all great because it's all experience, learning and finding out who we are, what motivates us and what inspires us. You meet great people along the way. 

Some people are great at the skills you need to develop. You say, “I can learn something from this person as well. They do this well and I'd like to do it well so I'll watch, learn and ask their advice and things like that.” From my small bit of knowledge of what's involved with Lyrissa in terms of the deanship position, there seems a corollary to that between the law firm context of being an associate and becoming a partner. 

You have a responsibility for bringing in business, having clients and all of these outward-facing responsibilities that you may not have had as an associate. You can either choose to do and develop that or not. That's part of the job. Part of the job is getting out there and getting clients when you become a partner. It's a similar thing with the deanship. 

I wish we were better at this and I try to be better at it to let people know in advance, “If you want to advance to certain positions here's what's going to be required. You might start developing those skills because you're going to be called upon to have them pretty quickly once you're in that position.” It's better to prepare and expand your skills when there's no immediate pressure to get it together, have things evolve in terms of connections, get comfortable being out there and offer to help clients and things like that. It’s the same thing in terms of funding for the school. 

That's great advice to everybody who's reading the show. As we think about what our next step is in our career, think about the type of skillsets that we need. Don't be shy about getting training either casually through mentoring, formally through certificate programs or online or in-person programs. Go for it. Learn. Get the skills. Try something new. I agree. 

It's how my mind works but even without intention towards the next step, I'm always curious about new ideas or even ideas outside the law that might translate to what we're doing, whether it's different kinds of study of things, different new evolving potential areas of the law and being curious and exploring those because you never know when some of those things might help you solve a problem that you wouldn't have otherwise known about. 

It expands your mind a little bit to think outside the box. Constantly learning and being open to new experiences and new ideas, not necessarily in the law or the area you're practicing or working in keeps your mind dynamic and open to new ideas in your discipline that will help you stay ahead of the game. 

That describes how I ended up getting a PhD and then moving on to public policy, eventually becoming a Dean of a public policy school. When I was doing my writing and research in law school, I was collecting data on judicial decision-making. In law schools, there are not a lot of empirical studies and classes, at least at the time that I was taking classes at the University of Minnesota several decades ago. That's changed a bit but the focus is more on critical thinking and legal skills, not on empirical skills and empirical and data analysis. 

I started taking classes at the undergraduate level in statistics, big data and analysis. I kept taking so many classes that eventually, I enrolled in a PhD program with virtually all the classwork done. I did a project that I was already working on for my PhD, which I turned into a book. I gained these amazing new skills because I was curious about data and data analysis. 

I got my PhD. I learned the difference between law and public policy at least in the JD versus PhD programs. In JDs, you learned to be a zealous advocate for your client. In PhD school, especially in data-oriented programs and I went to the University of Chicago, it was almost like a zealous commitment to the truth. What does the data say? You don't have a client per se. What is the truth about the world? How can we make policy that accounts for that truth to become a better society, community, nation and world? The more curious we are, the more we learn about stuff and the more it can impact our careers. 

I was wondering how you get to the PhD. I was thinking initially that you had thought about that in economics. I thought maybe you're like, “It's time to do that.” It’s much more organic because of your curiosity in trying to solve problems and saying, “This is like the tail of the elephant. I need to see the rest of the problem to see more of it.” The way to do that is to quantify it, look at data and take a different approach that strictly the law doesn't allow you to do. 

As we think about the next step in our career, think about the type of skill sets we need.

I was a full-tenured professor at Washington University and Northwestern. I sat in on undergraduate classes to learn stats and relearn stats. At one point when I was at the PhD level learning stats, I had to continue with undergraduate level classes so I could remember to do the PhD level statistics, data analysis and empirical research that I wanted to do. 

I had to go back from the start and candidly, I loved it. I met so many great people. I became a better teacher by being a student again. I saw things that worked well. I saw things I did that I found so annoying as a student but thought not even a little bit about as a faculty member. It helped me be a better teacher too. 

I'm so glad you said that because I've had those experiences too where I'm doing something, I'm like, “That's not good,” and you do that. “No, you need to change that.” 

You find things you're doing wrong or new ideas to do something even better or even a whole new career. 

Also, there are opportunities. One of the plus sides in opportunities of COVID has been so many things going online. If you're curious, maybe you wouldn't fly across the country to take one seminar in some area you think you might be interested in but you're not sure about. You certainly can take an online course and there are so many more online courses that you can investigate and dip your toe in. 

I was at university so it was so easy for me to audit classes from top to bottom. Many of us aren't at universities and that's not an option. You have to find another way. There are a lot of different types of classes online. Some are free. Some you have to pay for. If you can't take extension classes at your local university, which of course could be an option, you could still perhaps do something online. I agree. 

When I lived and worked in Los Angeles, I took a lot of extension creative writing classes at UCLA because I lived right next to UCLA. Those writing classes changed many of the things that I do in my legal writing. One thing informs the other. I was seeing the parallels or opportunities to improve things using some of the principles I had learned in the creative writing classes but there are some amazing extensions and other classes at universities. 

Some of them are online too. I took online creative writing classes at Stanford when they were starting to do online teaching. There's also that. Also, on the show was Michelle Hanlon who runs the Space Law Program at Ole Miss. They have an LL.M. program that's almost exclusively online in space law. It's parallel with their class but as an in-person class and then you can come to the school for part of it that you like but it allows people to learn a new area of the law and get the LL.M. in it without having to be in the South in the US. Many of them have careers that they're working in. 

A lot of us have careers and we don't have time to take 1 year or 2 off to get a degree. That's another reason why extension courses, auditing courses or online courses can help us be learning beings and still be professionals. 

Always be open to expanding your perspective and mind. I've always found it comes back even if you say, “I'm going to continue to do what I'm doing.” All of that enriches you as you're going on your path and changes how you approach things or at least gives you the opportunity to change things. My teaching in law schools and clinics also impacts how I work with my associates, being committed to the long-term development of newer attorneys, whether it's in the law school or at the firm. My experience with that has impacted how I work with them here. Everything is connected and everything impacts how you show up in different settings. 

Let's talk about RAND, the graduate school and your move from Dean of law school to the Dean of Pardee RAND. It is a public policy school. It's not a law school. What differences have you seen in that role as opposed to being a Dean of a law school? How do you think your background, both in policy and the law has impacted how you see that role or how you lead? 

I want to start with your last area of interest, which is my training in law and how that's impacted my career. I am so excited about legal training. I loved my PhD training. It offered something different than what we offer in law schools. That training focuses on critical and analytical thinking, problem-solving and coming to the table with ideas on how not only to solve the problem but to even understand the problem first. 

It's a messy collection of facts and ideas that clients bring. They don't come with, “The Second Amendment of the Constitution says this and this thing happened that specifically fits.” Instead, the lawyers are trained to understand what the legal issues are and then figure out how to solve them and do that by way of negotiation, engagement and collaboration. I can't see better life lessons than the lessons that you get in getting a JD. 

I am high on legal training for being a great professional in any discipline. The legal training has helped me in every aspect of my career. The major difference between a graduate school and PhDs is we have no JDs. The program is much longer and the students are writing their dissertations. These are very big projects. It takes twice as long to get through a PhD program. 

The interests are different. There's not this notion that a client hires you and you have to go and advocate for their interests. With public policy, especially the policy program that we have where it's very data-oriented, science and analytical-focused, we're trying to figure out what facts exist in the world and how can they be used to leverage better policy. A lot of the clients that come to RAND are clients that are asking RAND researchers and that would include the PhD students to work on problems that they have. 

We might work for an agency in the US Government, the NGO or the city of LA. We have lots of clients that come to us that are asking us to help solve their problems but we come to it with a commitment to non-partisanship and objectivity. That means that our clients could get an answer they don't like. That's the work we do. In law, you would never say, “I'm going to research this and tell you what I believe the law should be. Sorry if you don't like it.” 

The other major difference between the Pardee RAND Graduate School and all other departments in schools across the world is we're a part of a bigger research organization. Universities are research organizations but we're a think tank, which means that we're client-oriented. Sometimes people say we're a lot like a consulting firm where clients come to us and we solve their problems. We are very singular in that way. No other graduate school sits in a think tank. No other thing tank in the world has a graduate school like the Pardee RAND Graduate School. It's very different in that way too. 

Part of it too is being associated with RAND's approach to problem-solving itself, which is how it has such significant credibility and continues to have credibility in a time that's quite divisive in many ways. It’s that commitment to being objective and saying, “We will investigate this problem. The answer may not be what you think it is.”

The more curious we are, the more we learn about stuff, and the more it can impact our careers.   

That's why someone who asks to have things studied says, “We're going to make policy about something because we think X is the problem or Y is the way to solve X problem.” It turns out the data says no. There is no X. The problem is something else. You're creating policy to fit a problem that is fictional and doesn't exist in the world. It plays an important role that you're making sure that you're working or creating policies that reflect or impact what's going on. 

MC, you nailed it because the RAND Corporation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, objective-based research organization. That is also very unique. Many think tanks are either very left-leaning or right-leaning. There's nothing wrong with that but that's not the RAND model or the RAND vision. We're a part of the RAND Corporation so we too teach our students with the same perspective in mind nonpartisan objective and database orientation to coming to policy problems. 

To get a PhD at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, you have to do 300 days of work on real projects with real clients. The students get paid as researchers doing this, some call it consulting work and some call it research, but essentially, working with the client and answering the question that they've posed and finding ways to solve their problems. We're very much intertwined with the RAND Corporation. 

I love that because it elevates our work and gives the students opportunities. We don't have anything like tenure at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. We have access to thousands of researchers who were located in seven offices across the world and they teach for us. They come in and take lessons from the field into the classroom. The students take those classroom lessons back to the field. 

The classroom dynamic works often in a predictable way with the basic sciences, economics and data science or like a laboratory for new ideas to answer new questions that are coming in from clients. It's an amazing opportunity that I haven't seen elsewhere. There are a lot of good educational models. This is a unique one. As you can see, I'm excited about it. 

It isn't just that you move from a law school setting to a public policy school setting but RAND and the Pardee RAND School are so unique in themselves also that you're talking about one kind of opportunity that you could have to do this. That's pretty exciting. At certain points in your career, it's nice to have those only one opportunity in the world experiences to do. 

The interesting thing is when the students work on these projects, these projects almost always produce a written report. Our students often graduate with twenty publications. They're going on the market after working for a year or more on these real-world projects with railroad clients with actual products at the end. When they go on the market, employers are floored by a recent PhD student with this amazing list of publications. It's cool. 

It's a positive thing for them in terms of giving them a leg up in the job market after school as well. Also, having the RAND researchers, teaching and also working on projects with RAND in the RAND ethos of collaboration and curiosity and all of that in terms of objectivity, certainly what I've seen on that advisory board is there's a unique openness both to collaboration between different disciplines and a curiosity about what the answer is. 

We're looking at objective data. We're trying to find this out and figure out how to solve the problem and make sure that the client has proper input before they have any outputs. The students have access to that ethos all along. RAND is imprinting through graduate school the next generation of public policy researchers and teachers too through that. 

We're educating the next generation of policy leaders. Our students might go to the university, think tank or the government. A lot of them go to big tech because the skills we teach are so very quantitative and technology-focused. The other thing that you mentioned I want to emphasize as well is that public policy is inherently interdisciplinary. When you're thinking about policy, you've got to understand culture and economics. 

If you're thinking about climate change, you have to understand science. If you're thinking about space, policy and physics. At RAND, we have probably over 1,000 researchers in every discipline you could imagine like law, medicine, physics, chemistry, anthropology and history. We have art historians on our staff because all of these disciplines play a role in how policy is made at the state local and national levels and across the world. 

That's what's unique to you in terms of having so many disciplines within RAND, people who are experts in different areas. Having that cross-pollination between the different experts leads to new questions being asked. I think about that sometimes too in terms of we see certain things percolating or developing in one area of the law, for example. There’s somebody else in another area having a similar issue percolating. 

When you come together, you say, “That's a real problem because we've seen it from these different angles.” It’s the same thing on the RAND Advisory Board. We have defense lawyers, academics, judges, people at corporations and other institutions that have an interest in the civil justice system. If you ask each of us what we see as developing areas, we see different aspects even within the same system. When you have a convergence, both the plaintiff's defense, academia and judges are all seeing something happening but they're calling it different things because they're seeing different parts of it. They say, “A-ha. We have an issue that's touching on a lot of different things that either needs to be studied or we need to put that on the radar to be studied.” 

It's the same thing with the different disciplines of, “I'm seeing this develop. Yes, that could be a problem.” Collaborate. Have the RAND researchers in the different disciplines come together to do research and bring their expertise. That's something that they can participate in. The students can participate but it’s also unique to RAND because there are so many experts in many areas. 

What you said captures a key part of that role. What we're always trying to do is find new solutions to clients’ problems or rethink how to state the problem so we can find an even better way of addressing the world's biggest challenges. My job in innovation is to foster that type of innovative and inspiring environment. 

We do that by thinking about projects that the corporation can subsidize that no client would because they're too risky, too long-term, too controversial or too inchoate. I helped to identify projects that the corporation will focus on. Over the years, we've spent a lot of time, energy and resources supporting internal work on gun policy, DEI and artificial intelligence. One piece of my job is finding the issues that need to be studied but we don't have the funding to study them. 

Secondly, collaborating across the classroom and the research type work, a collaboratory where we come together, find new solutions and try new things. Some fail. Some succeed. Finally, a lot of what we do is translate our research into new technologies. There might be new data sets, new methods or new technologies and things that emerge. We help to foster that through my innovation role. New research approaches and new methodological approaches using the classroom as a collaboratory and then fostering new things that come out of all this work. 

That made me think about what is RAND going into Web3, NFTs and things like that. Where RAND has been very good too is finding ways to communicate research findings and things like that in a way that is easily encapsulated and understood in whatever tools are there to make that happen and if there are new tools to use those as well. That's so great. I'm so glad you explained that. It is a title and a role with RAND Corporation, not with the graduate school. I was curious how that worked and that makes a lot of sense, bringing in the graduate school to those collaborations and having it across the institutions. 

Public policy is inherently interdisciplinary.

It's amazing. I feel like I could talk to you forever. Our time is wearing out. I'm sorry. I wish we have days more to talk about so many interesting things. I want to thank you for inviting me. I appreciate you giving me your time. 

Nancy, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. I feel the same way. It's been enjoyable. You have a unique perspective in terms of providing. I don't know that we've had anyone who's been an expert or studied tax law, to begin with, and then in your role teaching at RAND and to the public policy work at RAND. You exemplify what you were saying, which I believe too in terms of legal training, which is that it is such a good foundation for so many different roles and many other things. 

Sometimes it can be the start of where you go. That is not something that law students or people going to law school always recognize or know. To have someone with your experience and your lived experience in so many different ways to confirm that will be helpful to those who might be maybe a little skeptical about whether that does apply but I've seen that in executive boardrooms, nonprofit boards and several different roles. The way we are taught to think and the critical thinking skills and boiling things down is a helpful skill that translates across a lot of avenues. Thank you so much for sharing and joining the show. It was a joy to meet you. 

Thank you so much for hosting me. I was honored to be invited. I appreciate all your amazing work.