Texas A&M University School of Law is starting its school year with a new leader who plans to focus on maintaining the school's momentum by recruiting top faculty and students and engaging with the bench and bar communities.

The university appointed Bobby Ahdieh to the post in late June and he's just two weeks into his first school year but already immersed in the Aggie community.

Texas A&M under former law dean Andrew Morriss enjoyed a meteoric rise up the U.S. News & World Report best law school rankings since the state university purchased the law school in 2012 from Texas Wesleyan University. The school was No. 111 in 2016, rose to No. 92 in 2017 and continued the upward trajectory to No. 80 this year. After five years as dean, Morriss left the helm last year for another position at Texas A&M. Law professor Thomas Mitchell was interim dean as a university committee searched nationwide for a new law dean.

Ahdieh earned his law degree from Yale University in 1997 and then served in a yearlong judicial clerkship with Judge James Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He then moved to Washington, D.C. to be a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice for two years. In 2000, Ahdieh entered the world of legal academia as a professor of private international law at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. He was a vice dean and associate dean of faculty at Emory, and the director of its Center on Federalism and Intersystemic Governance.

Texas Lawyer spoke with Ahdieh about his plans for Texas A&M. Here are his answers, edited for brevity and clarity.

Texas A&M has moved quickly up the law school rankings. How big of a priority is it for you to keep up that momentum, and how will you do it?

I'd separate out momentum from rank. You can imagine maintaining momentum, it may or may not show up in the rank. There are schools that rise in the rankings through a variety of gimmicks not grounded in the forward momentum of the institution. My priority is maintaining the momentum of the law school in terms of building a world-class faculty, recruiting top-knotch students and planting them in better jobs, building the community and engaging with the law school community—the bench and bar.

My expectation would be if we are doing all the things, rank will follow.

How do you think that Texas A&M's law student body might change over your tenure?

There are incoming metrics in terms of past performance of the students. Much of the growth in the quality of the student body and hence our success in the back end in terms of placement and range of opportunities they get is based on the fact we are able to recruit stronger and stronger students. The second one is diversity across all the relevant axes: The incoming class is 62 percent female, a record for the law school. We're excited about that; also, racial and ethnic diversity, making sure we have a range of viewpoints and perspectives; geographic diversity; professional background—some come right out of college, some have professional experience. We really want to be the law school of the state of Texas; we also want our law school to be a destination law school for students all over the country and all over the world.

What will you be doing to help graduates to get better job placements?

The most critical task of any dean today of a law school is external relationships: fundraising, building relations with the outside world. Outside of that is maximizing the breadth and depth of opportunities for students of the law school. It includes everything from how do we increase the number of judicial clerkships available for students? It's a lot of time sitting down with judges one-on-one, talking about what they are looking for there. Beyond judges it's all sorts of legal employment opportunities. It's the dean getting all over the state and meeting with people in private practice, folks in-house, in the public interest section, in government, about why students in this law school are as good or better than anyone else they are looking at.

In hiring new law professors, what will you be looking for?

We are a business, but we are in the business of advancing human knowledge. We do it along two axes: the scholarship and policy work that our faculty does, and we do it of course by educating the next generation of lawyers and leaders. Those tasks are equally crucial and deeply intertwined. We want to recruit faculty firing on both axes—on the cutting edge of policy work and scholarship, analyzing of key issues of the day, but also fundamentally engaged with and excited about educating young people.

What's something you've learned about Aggie law faculty, staff and students so far that really stood out to you?

At this law school, there is a great deal of passion for being part of A&M in every sense. In the practical, functional sense, but also in the sense of the community and the network and the family that our law students are becoming a part of. Also, in terms of the fundamental values—I talk about Aggie core values regularly—it's hard for me to come up with a better distillation of what it means to be a great lawyer and great leader. The student body at the law school embraces that and really values that. As a community, that's been striking to me.

Angela Morris is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter at @AMorrisReports.