‘Totally my decision’: After less than two years, University of Miami law dean steps down

Nearly three years after his official predecessor got abruptly fired, a move that stirred a national wave of criticism at the time, the University of Miami law school dean will step down in April.

“I am stepping down as dean at the end of the month,” David Yellen, the current dean, told the Herald when reached Friday afternoon, adding he would take a one-year sabbatical and then return as a faculty member to the law school.

UM President Julio Frenk abruptly pushed out the last dean, Anthony Varona, in May 2021. Frenk’s decision sparked outrage among professors, students and alumni, and prompted Varona to hire a lawyer who denounced the move at the time as “an egregious violation” of the dean’s rights. Varona is now the law dean at Seattle University, a private Jesuit Catholic institution in Washington state.

FROM 2021: UM fires its law school dean, setting off outrage among faculty, alums and students

Yellen declined to explain why he resigned, but said he chose to hand in his notice.

“This was totally my decision,” said Yellen, a New Jersey native who joined UM in July 2022.

Frenk announced the news to the UM community in an email Friday but didn’t offer any motives.

“As we prepare to depart for Spring Break, I write to inform you of two important changes in our academic leadership,” Frenk wrote. “I have accepted the resignation of Dean and M. Minnette Massey Professor of Law David Yellen, effective April 1, 2024.”

“During his time as Dean, he laid the groundwork for Miami Law to fully embrace the University’s strategic priority of facilitating lifelong learning, with a planned expansion of online offerings,” he added.

FROM 2022: UM hires Cornell Law grad as its law school dean, following tumult after Varona demotion

Frenk said the university would begin a national search for “a world-class law school dean,” but didn’t provide a clear timeline.

The president named Patricia Sanchez Abril, the interim dean of the UM Graduate School and a business law professor at the Miami Herbert Business School, as the interim dean of the law school.

As a result, he said, Nicole Leeper Piquero, the chair of the sociology and criminology department at the College of Arts and Sciences, will move in as the interim dean of the UM Graduate School.

Sanchez Abril will become the fifth acting, interim or official dean at the UM law school in the past three years.

After Varona left, Frenk named UM law professor Steve Schnably as acting dean in June 2021. Then Frenk named outsider Nell Jessup Newton, who had served as dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School for a decade, as the UM law school interim dean for a year in August 2021. Then Frenk hired Yellen in May 2022.

Last May, for the first time ever, the law school at Florida International University surpassed the UM law school in national rankings. FIU’s was ranked third in the state, besting the private UM, which was founded in the 1920s and whose annual tuition is nearly three times higher than what an in-state law student pays at the state-funded FIU.