the Children’s Law Clinic. Starting with virtually no knowledge of the field, Wettach became one of the state’s foremost experts in special education law, led the revision of school discipline statutes, won a case before the North Carolina Supreme Court on behalf of suspended students, mentored new education lawyers, and published definitive resources for children in the school system and their advocates. “She is one of the true founders of the modern clinical program at the Law School, and she has really modeled for all of us the idea that clinical faculty are teachers of our students, advocates for our clients, and leaders in helping to shape the law and make it better for the communities we care about and the people we serve,” said Clinical Professor Andrew Foster, director of the Community Enterprise Clinic and director of clinical programs at Duke Law. Said Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law: “Not only was Jane a pioneer of clinical education at Duke Law, but she has taken an active role in building it. Helping clients solve their challenges is a profound experience for a student, and Jane has helped them to have those experiences in a very supportive setting. She will be greatly missed by all of us.”
Channeling a desire to serve through the law
Jane Wettach
Children’s Law Clinic founder led N.C. educational reform, modeled excellence as advocate and clinician
J
ane R. Wettach, a nationally-recognized expert on special education law who helped relaunch Duke Law’s clinical program and shaped it for more than 20 years, retired on June 30. Wettach, now the William B. McGuire Clinical Professor Emerita of Law and founding director of the Children’s Law Clinic, joined the faculty in 1994 as a teacher of legal research and writing after a 14-year career at Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC). She found her calling in clinical education two years later when she became supervising attorney in the AIDS Legal Assistance Project, the first in-house legal clinic of Duke Law’s modern era, and went on to launch its second,
A Cincinnati native, Wettach traces her desire to be a lawyer to her grandfather, a longtime faculty member of the University of North Carolina School of Law and its dean from 1941 to 1949. After graduating from UNC with a degree in journalism, she worked at a newspaper in Connecticut before returning to Chapel Hill and UNC Law. There she met her future husband, Paul Baldasare, and a classmate, Pam Silberman, who helped focus Wettach’s public service leanings and became a longtime LANC colleague and lifelong friend. “She thinks through all angles of an issue very thoroughly and is so meticulous in preparing,” said Silberman, now a professor of health policy and management at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “I’ve always said that if I ever needed a lawyer I would want Jane.” Wettach developed considerable expertise in public benefits law over 14 years serving clients in LANC’s Winston-Salem and Raleigh offices. But when the long commute began to conflict with the needs of her two young children, she answered an ad to teach legal writing at Duke Law. “I thought I would teach writing for a few years and then go back to practice,” she said. “It wasn’t my expectation that I would go into teaching as a career.”
Duke Law Magazine • Summer 2020
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