Paul Paton Named Dean of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law
International legal expert Paul D. Paton, JSD, has been named dean of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law.
International legal expert Paul D. Paton, JSD, has been named dean of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law. Paton has been a professor and university administrator in the United States and Canada and has helped lead legal organizations in both countries. He has most recently been a professor of law and ethics at the University of Alberta, an R1 university in Edmonton, Canada. He was dean of law from 2014 to 2019.
Paton “champions excellence for himself and others and does so with collegial good humor and humility,” said Provost Norma Bouchard. Paton is a first-generation student and lawyer. His maternal grandparents immigrated to Canada from Ukraine. “Paul and his siblings were instilled with the importance of maximizing the benefit of any educational opportunity that they could earn by working hard, respecting others, and giving back,” Bouchard said.
Paton directed an undergraduate arts and sciences program at the University of Toronto and became a professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law in 2004, later directing its international law program in England. In 2008, he was recruited by the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento to direct its Ethics Across the Professions Initiative, a 10-year, $250,000 grant supporting multidisciplinary research and programming. He became a professor and later served as University of the Pacific’s first vice provost, serving all three of its campuses in northern California.
His academic work focuses on legal ethics, professional responsibility, comparative regulation of the legal profession, corporate governance and ethics in corporate contexts. He has taught courses in U.S. and Canadian law schools and in international programs in those subjects, international law and more.
WittKieffer’s Werner Boel, LLM, Shelley Arakawa, JD, and Ashlee Winters Musser led this search.
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