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Rotundas to leave GMU for California law school

Pair are latest to join faculty for Chapman

Constitutional law scholar and legal ethics expert Ronald D. Rotunda will leave Northern Virginia’s George Mason University School of Law after going public with a spat between his wife and another GMU professor. In pulling up stakes in Fairfax this summer, Rotunda and his wife, Kyndra, become the latest in a series of academic leaders departing GMU for Chapman University in Orange County, Calif.

In recent months, the Rotundas apparently found themselves at odds with the GMU administration. When Kyndra Rotunda, herself a law professor, resigned from a GMU clinic that provides legal assistance for military service members, Ronald Rotunda released a packet of documents detailing Kyndra’s conflicts with the clinic’s executive director.

GMU officials responded that the matter had previously been investigated without any finding of wrongdoing by the executive director. A GMU spokesperson termed Rotunda’s release of the documents “totally inappropriate.” The imbroglio was documented by a GMU student publication, “The Docket.”

Officially, the university has little else to say on the couple’s departure. “Professor Rotunda is an outstanding scholar,” commented GMU spokesman Dan Walsch. “We wish him well.”

Whatever the reason for the departure of the Rotundas, they are following a now well-worn path from George Mason to Chapman. The apparent leader of the exodus is Chapman’s current chancellor, Daniele Struppa, Ph.D., who left GMU to join the Chapman faculty along with his wife in 2006.

Next to head westward was Nobel laureate Vernon L. Smith, Ph.D., known as the “father of economic science,” and his team of scholars, establishing Chapman’s new Economic Science Institute last year. Earlier this month, Chapman bagged a team of GMU quantum physicists, earth observers and computational scientists led by Menas Kafatos, Ph.D. The group included renowned physicist Yakir Aharonov, Ph.D.

GMU’s Walsch noted that Struppa has a lot of professional history at Mason and likely influenced the others to join him in California. “He knows many of the players,” Walsh said.

Rotunda’s academic credentials and scholarship are highly regarded. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law, Ronald Ro-tunda clerked at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, practiced law in Washington, D.C., and served as assistant majority counsel for the Watergate Committee. He joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1974 and moved to GMU in 2002.

Rotunda co-authored a widely-used course book on legal ethics and authored the course book Modern Constitutional Law. According to a Chapman news release, Rotunda’s books and articles have been cited more than 1000 times by state and federal courts.

Rotunda also is known for his eccentricities, including a large and colorful collection of bow ties. On his GMU Web page, he is pictured with a life-size photo cut-out of the Mr. Spock character from “Star Trek”. (The caption explains that Rotunda is the one on the left.)

Kyndra Rotunda is an expert on military disability benefits and legal aid for military families. She is the author of a recent book on the Guantánamo trials.

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