Penn State Dickinson Law dean, with new national role, talks inclusivity, Trump’s ban on DEI, and law school merger

Philadelphia native Danielle M. Conway, dean of Penn State Dickinson Law, has been named president-elect of the national Association of American Law Schools, a first for a Pennsylvania State University administrator.

Conway, who joined Penn State in 2019, led efforts to reunify the university’s two law schools, one in State College and the other in Carlisle; they are now one entity known as Penn State Dickinson Law under the merger recently approved by the American Bar Association.

In her new national role, she will identify a theme for the association to investigate and research under her year of leadership in 2026.

» READ MORE: Penn State may reunite its two law schools in Carlisle and University Park

Conway, 56, of Carlisle, grew up around Sixth and Brown Streets in Northern Liberties and attended Greenfield School and George Washington Carver High School for Engineering and Science, a magnet.

She got her bachelor’s degree from New York University Stern School of Business, then her law degree from Howard University and dual master’s of law degrees from George Washington University. To help pay for college, she got a scholarship through participation in the Army ROTC. To serve her military obligation, she worked as an Army judge advocate general officer and was admitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Chief Counsel’s Honors Program.

She served active, reserve, and National Guard duty in the Army for 27 years, retiring in 2016 as a lieutenant colonel.

Conway recently talked with The Inquirer about her commitment to inclusivity and the 14th Amendment, which requires equal protection under the law and grants citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States. (President Donald Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship and denying citizenship to children of migrants here illegally or on temporary visas.)

» READ MORE: Penn State professors and students are raising concerns about a proposal to merge its two law schools

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

When I was active duty, I really enjoyed the teaching elements of the master’s of law program. I also enjoyed mentoring and teaching my colleagues in the chief counsel’s honors program and the Corps of Engineers. … I realized that my passion was teaching. I decided to apply for a teaching position, specifically a legal research and writing position, at Georgetown University Law Center. I was successful in getting that position.

I was selected for a doctrinal position at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. I spent two years there and all the while I was doing reserve duties. I was assigned a reserve duty position either in Belgium or Hawaii. I took Hawaii. I met some wonderful people there. … Those folks asked me to stay. They said, “You should meet some people at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law.” About three months later they recruited me to teach there.

Fourteen years and some months.

It was wonderful, not just because of all the things you would expect. But because to live and to work in a host community, meaning a host community of Indigenous peoples with a history, it was a wonderful experience to learn about a new community, to learn about the history and the constitutionalism of a peoples who were brought into the United States in 1954.

I was able to learn about rural life because a lot of people don’t think about Hawaii as a rural place. My scholarship, my teaching, all benefited from that exposure and so I taught courses like Indigenous intellectual property law.

I taught government procurement and native Hawaiian organizations, so everything that I did there really introduced me to communities that are not necessarily mainstream, and it started to form my world view. I was able then to win a Fulbright Senior Scholar award for that work … and that took me to a teaching and learning position in Australia. My research there was really to expand my understanding of comparative law with respect to indigenous communities.

I was their dean from 2014 to 2019 with a very targeted vision of the intersection of rurality and marginalization.

The primacy of the 14th Amendment. It is so important to our civic education, how we have constitutionally remade society, how we have kept up with how our nation evolves, and how we pledge to recognize the importance of recognizing rights and obligations to the nation by recognizing the rights and obligations that people owe to the nation. And so the 14th Amendment is this powerful statement by our society that we embrace a multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, intersectional society that values and acknowledges the rights that people must have in an organized and civilized society.

I’m an African American woman, but I hope that you gleaned from what I communicated, what I learned through this experience in my life, was how to look at how others are being impacted and channeling my knowledge and my work and my scholarship in the service of others.

I felt that way and because it was so early in my career … you don’t have words for how you’re feeling. You don’t have a vocabulary to explain what that lack of inclusion feels like and what it does to you as a budding professional. But as you go forward and you have these experiences through your work, through your reading, through your scholarship, through your engagement with the civic experiment, you start to get the words.

What all my experiences were training me up to do was to expand my understanding of empathy.

To be an inclusive, multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and intersectional society, I don’t see that as work that we should relegate to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. This is work that we must do, frankly, because when we remade society through the 14th Amendment, this was everyone’s obligations. DEI is not the requirement. The 14th Amendment is the requirement.

Anyone who wants to distract or diminish the foundational significance of the 14th Amendment should cause grave concern.

I think the answer is yes. I paused because it is not his responsibility alone to not distract us. It’s our responsibility not to be distracted.

Anti-racism, that is the 14th Amendment. That’s why we specifically have an anti-racist development institute. It is to dismantle systemic racism.

Oh, yes.

I think the real question is what does it mean for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that its law school now is one. It is an important and powerful decision that our president made to have us not duplicate resources, to have us not compete against each other, to have us actually benefit from the power of both of the law schools.

The merger is complete. We have received approval from our regional and national accreditors. We are having wonderful meetings with staff, students, and faculty about how to implement this now, and these meetings have been ongoing for about a year and folks are generally excited. There’s that expected anxiety that comes with uncertainty, but with every meeting and every program that we do together, we chip away at that anxiety.

My greatest hobby at this point is parenting. We have one child, and we call him the last egg because I had him at 43. He is 13. I guess my hobbies are lived through him. He is a budding commercial airline pilot. He does flight lessons every other week. Because I want him to be well-rounded, my hobbies with him include playing the piano and he plays the violin, so we practice and do duets. The last thing that we do together, which I insist upon, is we are voracious readers. We do our own little two-person book club.

Yeah, because the flight lessons are in Northeast Philly. My brother bought my mom’s house and so he lives there in the house that I grew up in.

I’m just very proud to be the dean of Penn State Dickinson Law.