Carolyn Wilkes Kaas will receive the Tapping Reeve Legal Educator Award at the Connecticut Bar Association’s annual celebration, Celebrate with the Stars, on Wednesday, May 3. She is the associate dean of experiential education and associate professor of law at Quinnipiac University School of Law.
In addition to her role as associate dean, she also serves as co-director of the school’s Center on Dispute Resolution and as the director of two of the school’s concentrations: family law and civil advocacy and dispute resolution. Dean Kaas received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Cornell University in 1976, graduating with distinction in all subjects, and graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1983 with highest honors. Before joining the faculty of Quinnipiac School of Law in 1989, she worked as a litigation associate for Wiggin and Dana LLP in New Haven.
Dean Kaas has been responsible for Quinnipiac School of Law’s experiential curriculum since 2016. For 20 years she taught in the school’s in-house civil clinic, supervising students who represented low-income clients in a variety of civil and family matters. She currently teaches a wide range of field placement courses as well as a companion seminar, “Examining the Practice of Law.” Last year, she created and launched a new course for first year law students entitled “Foundations of Practice in 2022,” which focuses on skills and professional identity formation. Dean Kaas has also taught various courses on family law, interviewing, counseling, and mediation.
In addition to serving on the board of the Clinical Legal Education Association, Dean Kaas also served as the association’s president in 2001. She is a member of the Connecticut Bar Association’s Professionalism Committee, serves on the boards of the Connecticut Council for Non-Adversarial Divorce and Connecticut Legal Services, and is a founding member of the Connecticut Mediation Association and The Non-Defensive Voice. For the last six years, Dean Kaas has served on the American Bar Association (ABA) Law Student Division’s Competitions Committee, which oversees all the ABA-sponsored law student competitions.
Dean Kaas has written on the topics of legal education, clinical legal education, family law, and mediation. She was an editor and contributing author for the 2015 book, Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World. She also contributed to Lawyers as Changemakers, a book published by the American Bar Association that discusses the integrative law movement and legal education.
The Tapping Reeve Legal Educator Award is presented to a distinguished CBA member who is a member of the faculty, a clinical instructor, or an adjunct instructor at UConn Law School, Quinnipiac Law School, Yale Law School, or Western New England Law School who has contributed greatly to the legal education of his or her colleagues.
View the complete list of this year’s Celebrate with the Stars awardees.
Register now.
View sponsorship and advertising opportunities for the event.