n July 1, Tania Tetlow, a former law professor and president of Loyola University New Orleans, started her tenure as the 33rd president of Fordham University. She is the first layperson, first woman, and the first attorney to lead the institution in its 181-year history.

Tetlow received her law degree from Harvard Law School and a bachelor’s degree from Tulane University. Prior to being named president of Loyola in 2018, she was senior vice president and chief of staff at Tulane, where she previously served as associate provost for international affairs, the Felder-Fayard Professor of Law, and director of the university’s domestic violence clinic. From 2000 to 2005, she was a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana, where she specialized in general crimes, violent crimes, and major narcotics cases.

“This is a particularly exciting time to be involved in the [FTC]’s work,” said Sussman, citing President Biden’s executive order to promote competition and refocus antitrust enforcement as well as the significant antitrust and consumer protection legislation under consideration by Congress.

Reset, Rebuild, Reinvent

rom her 36th-floor office window, Bonnie Neuman ’06 can see the life trickling back into New York City. The dark days of the early pandemic are a fading memory, her young son is back at school, and work is “crazy busy” again. Neuman heads Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft’s real estate finance division in lower Manhattan, where she can see the tourists heading to the Freedom Tower or over to Battery Park to hop on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Their return to New York City means a return to normalcy for the hotel and hospitality sector that makes up a good part of her real estate finance business.

“I didn’t understand one word anybody said there, not one,” said Redel, who is also the only woman ever elected chairman of the board of Commodity Exchange. But she went home and read up on the subject. The more she learned, the more she saw it everywhere, with companies like Ernst & Young and Fidelity getting involved. “Before I knew it, I was knee-deep in it.”

She isn’t referring to the two framed prints backed by NFTs³—made for her by the pioneering cryptoartist Kevin Abosch—on her home office wall. In 2018, Redel developed a blockchain course at Fordham Law, soon after adding one on smart contracts, where computer code acts as a digital agreement between two parties, and another on decentralized finance, a blockchain-based ecosystem that doesn’t rely on banks or brokers for transactions.

rowing up, Madeline Singas ’91 spent many afternoons at her family’s pizza shop in Queens, but she never pulled a hot slice from the oven or took a customer’s order. Her parents, immigrants from Greece who didn’t finish high school, never let her or her sister work at Singas Famous Pizza. She was there with her schoolbooks, doing homework.

“My parents didn’t speak English well, but the one word they mastered was ‘study,’ she recalled. “They saw education as a vehicle to a better life for their kids.”

That reverence for education led Singas to a 30-year career in the public sector, during which she focused on improving the lives of vulnerable groups, including the elderly, immigrants, and survivors of domestic violence. Her career also blazed a trail for Greek Americans: In 2015, she became the first Greek American woman to serve as a district attorney in New York state. And last year, Singas was appointed associate judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, the first Greek American to sit on the state’s highest court.

After graduating from Barnard with a degree in political science, Singas thrived at Fordham, where she was drawn to courses on criminal law. “There were a lot of children of immigrants and those from blue-collar families, and I felt a real affinity for them,” she said. She began her career as an assistant district attorney in New York’s Queens County, where she specialized in addressing domestic violence. “It was a time when women didn’t have a lot of faith in the criminal justice system to protect them in these situations, and often law enforcement didn’t take that crime as seriously as it took other crimes,” she said. “I couldn’t believe the amount of violence that children and women were subjected to in their own homes by people that purportedly loved them. I wanted to be a voice for them.”

That commitment to service left an indelible mark on McShane’s son: Joseph M. McShane, who would go on to become a Jesuit and the president of Fordham University. “[My father] was immensely proud of the Law School and grateful for his Fordham education,” Father McShane said. “The emphasis on service really changed him.”

That ethos was the driving force behind Father McShane’s transformative leadership of the University. He has been intimately involved with the Law School during his tenure, from reshaping the physical campus to enhancing the school’s academic quality.

Jaeger-Fine catapulted Fordham Law into a highly respected player on the international stage “through her sheer force of will,” said Dean Matthew Diller when presenting her with the 2022 Dean’s Medal of Recognition in May. Under Jaeger-Fine’s 16-year tenure, Fordham Law established new LL.M. programs, online degrees in Compliance and U.S. Law, the innovative M.S.L. program, the S.J.D. program, the Legal English Institute, the Summer Institute, the Pre-Law Institute, the Structural Issues in Law Firm Management program, and the RISE Leadership Academy for the Advancement of Women in Law. “None of these programs would exist without Toni’s leadership,” said Dean Diller.

hortly before the pandemic, a judge in the Drug Court Part in Bronx Criminal Court tried to persuade a young man to enter a drug treatment program. However, the man said he couldn’t afford to stop working his job at a flooring company to address his substance abuse issues due to the huge fines and fees attached to his offenses hanging over his head. There was no leeway; due to a New York state law passed during the 1990s, the height of the “tough on crime” era, the judge could not waive the mandatory court fines and fees because of the young man’s inability to pay, nor as an incentive for the young man to complete treatment. As a result, the young man declined critical assistance.

In August 2019, Peggy Herrera, a mother from Queens, called emergency services when her 16-year-old son, who had been previously criminalized for his mental health issues, experienced an anxiety attack. After counseling, her son calmed down. The police, however, proceeded to remove her son from their home. Herrera, who had never been arrested, told the police she could assist her son herself. As she described in the New York Daily News, Herrera was tackled from behind and arrested. The following March, Herrera’s charges were dropped, but she and her family remain trapped in debt from mandated fines and fees.

“I Believe in
Showing Up”

A. I’ll never forget the time during our orientation in the fall of 1983 when John Feerick gave a speech in the old Lowenstein Auditorium. I was 22, and he had graduated from Fordham the year I was born. I was immediately taken by him. There are some people who have a bedside manner and others who don’t, and John truly has empathy. He was always looking to figure out how to help you, both as a student and once you graduated. I also fell in love with my professors, including Hugh Hansen, Maria Marcus, Joseph Perillo, and Georgene Vairo, among others. After my first year, I wrote on to both the International Law Journal and the Urban Law Journal, and I joined the ULJ—eventually becoming a commentary editor during my third year. My daughter, Kayla, is also on the ULJ, and the first thing she saw when she walked into the journal’s office was a photograph of me as a student—with a lot of big hair. I also did moot court. The ULJ and moot court offices were right across the hall from each other in the old building, which was very convenient, since I was spending 24/7 on campus during the week.

When Ryan Washington decided he wanted to be a lawyer as an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, he didn’t have to look far for mentors. “I joined Morehouse’s moot court program,” said Washington, 26. “That’s where I met [Fordham Law alum] Darius Johnson [’21], and the rest is history.” Washington followed Johnson to Fordham Law School because “I wanted to learn the law in a place that was rigorous. Fordham gives you the skills to be able to talk to anyone, to litigate any matter.”

Those skills came in especially handy when Washington returned to Morehouse in February of 2022 during Black History Month to talk to prospective law students at his alma mater and other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). “I’ve been an assistant coach for Morehouse’s moot court program, and I wanted to let students know that while being a lawyer isn’t just like Law & Order, it’s possible to really make an impact,” he said.