A HIGHER CALLING Before coming to Touro, Harry Ballan was a practicing lawyer with the global firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell for 25 years, 16 as a partner. His practice encompassed tax aspects of international mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, credit transactions, partnerships and private funds (hedge funds and private equity). Before joining Davis Polk, Harry received four degrees from Yale University, including a Ph.D., received a law degree from Columbia, clerked on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and pursued studies at the Conservatoire Americain of the Ecole Normale Faculte de Musique in Paris, France, with a special interest in the representation of music in the brain. Harry also studied neuroscience at the Luria Neuroscience Institute in New York City and worked at the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (founded by physician, best-selling author and NYU Medical School neurology professor Oliver Sacks), focusing on the development of music-based therapeutic interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury in combat veterans as well as other treatments for vulnerable and neglected populations. In 2011, after almost 20 years at Davis Polk, Harry’s beloved father Jack died. During the last four months of his father’s life, Harry communicated with him mostly through music, which led (among other things) to a renewed passion for understanding how music affects the brain and to further studies in neuroscience and work with the Oliver Sacks Institute. Jack Ballan, a proud WWII veteran who had served in the Pacific theater, had been a fierce patriot and a lawyer in the public interest, as a borough attorney, highway commissioner, prosecutor, and civil service commissioner for the State of New Jersey, among other roles. The way in which Harry’s father approached the practice of law inspired both Harry and his brother and shaped their interest in the intersection between the public interest and the private practice of law. (Harry’s brother, Jon, a pre-eminent practitioner in the area of tax-exempt bonds and public-private partnerships, leads the public finance group of an international law firm.) Jack Ballan’s death marked the beginning of a journey that ultimately led Harry to Touro. The very next year, 2012, saw the death of Harry’s other mentor and role model, his father-in-law, John Silber, a legendary teacher, scholar, public intellectual and university administrator. For 28 years, John and Harry had carried on a conversation that ranged from Kant (John’s academic specialty), Plato, Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Beethoven to baseball and grandchildren. John shaped Harry’s views about the purposes of the university and of higher education. For John Silber, despite his dedication to a distinguished career as one of the world’s pre-eminent Kant scholars, teaching always came first. After the deaths of his two role models, Harry began to think about whether there was something else for him to do with his life. While he loved Davis Polk and his practice there, he sought something that would honor the memory of these men in another way. In 2013, Harry became aware of Touro’s newly constituted veterans’ clinic, which focused on eliminating veterans’ homelessness. Harry was also aware of Touro’s mortgage foreclosure and disaster relief clinics, which had received both local and national attention for their excellence in serving neglected populations. In the midst of these other developments, in February 2015 Harry was appointed a Salzburg Global Fellow in neuroscience and the arts, followed by two further Salzburg Global Fellowships relating to neuroscience and learning (both sponsored by the Educational Testing Service), one in early childhood development and education (April 2015) and another in social and emotional learning (November 2016). Harry has brought this neuro scientific perspective to teaching and learning at the Law Center. When Harry received a call in 2016 asking whether he was interested in the Touro Law deanship, he thought first of those clinics, which appeared to embody a combination of his father’s professional ideals and his father-in-law’s belief in the mission of the university and the centrality of teaching. The goal of the Touro clinics was to combine teaching and community service, just as his father-in-law had combined teaching and community service when Boston University took over and revived the failing Chelsea, Massachusetts school system decades earlier. Harry recalled the image of his father-in-law, the great Kant scholar and university president, sitting on the floor teaching underprivileged schoolchildren. Harry saw an opportunity to help in a new endeavor, consistent with his dream of suitably honoring his mentors. These were the elements of what Harry saw: first, an opportunity to work in an environment in which the relationship between doctrinal (textbook) and experiential learning was fluid and dynamic, each enriching the other, each contributing to the community and the profession. Not only the clinics, with their vital public service component, but also the simulation courses (e.g., trial practice, drafting and negotiation) and the field placements (internships and externships, including in our own Public Advocacy Center) presented the possibility of a curriculum combining the best of practical and theoretical law. Second, with 30 years of post-secondary teaching experience in both full-time and adjunct roles, Harry saw an opportunity to encourage and collaborate with a law school faculty that would put teaching first, with an emphasis on best practices consistent with experience and common sense but grounded in scientific evidence, including neuroscience. Third, as someone who had practiced business law for 25 years, Harry saw an opportunity to work with faculty on a curriculum in which the most sophisticated and complex business law was taught side-by-side with more traditional public interest classes, with an appreciation of the synergies rather than conflict between them (for example, so much of business law is consumer protection). Finally, Harry believed he could build student housing and restructure the school’s real estate. Student housing has the potential to transform school culture, create a sense of community and shared mission, and enhance teaching and learning immensely. This was the path, guided by the examples of his father the lawyer and his father-in- law the professor that led Harry to Touro, and that will set the tone for Harry’s stewardship of Touro’s future. 02 T H E TO U R O L AW Y E R  | S P R I N G 20 17 HARRY BALLAN Dean & Professor of Law