Jane Aiken

Jane Aiken serves as Dean of the School of Law at Wake Forest University.

Before joining WFU, Aiken served as an Administrator and the Blume Professor of Law at Georgetown University. At Georgetown, Aiken founded the Community Justice Project to enable students to represent clients in cases involving questions of justice where remedies are often transactional, policy-based or require extraordinary measures for adjudication. Her doctrinal courses primarily have been Evidence and Torts, while other courses included Motherhood and the Law and the Law of Extradition. Aiken has served as Associate Dean for Experiential Education and then Vice Dean for the Law Center, and she currently chairs the University Task Force on Gender Equity.

Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Aiken was the William Van Cleve Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. While at Washington University, she was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach law at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal. She has also taught in law schools at University of South Carolina and Arizona State University.

Aiken has earned many awards and honors for her contributions to the legal profession. She served as a Carnegie Scholar for Teaching and Learning and member of the American Bar Association Council on Legal Education from 2011 to 2017. She is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Foundation. She received the Frank Flegal Award for Excellent Teaching at Georgetown in 2010 and the Faculty Member of the Year Award in 2013.

Aiken is a leading scholar in clinical pedagogy and has directed a wide array of clinics involving prisoner’s rights, domestic violence against women and children, HIV, homelessness, police brutality and international human rights. In 2014, she co-authored The Clinic Seminar and Teaching the Clinical Seminar.