The new dean of the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law is a specialist in insurance, contract and sales law who also can opine about contemporary European philosophy and how it can lead to better lawyers.

Francis "Jay" Mootz, named as the head of the acclaimed Sacramento law school this week, served as associate dean at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Mootz, 50, who earned his law degree and a master's degree in philosophy from Duke University, also writes on connections between law, culture and humanities.

They are central to his approach to legal scholarship and teaching.

"What is interesting to me is that some of the contemporary work is really recovering ancient rhetoric, which is at the core of legal education," Mootz said in an interview Friday. "It finds connections to the notion of the lawyer as a statesman and person well-grounded in practical reason."

Mootz taught law courses at UNLV on sales, payment systems, jurisprudence, contracts and insurance.

In a news release announcing his hiring, McGeorge officials also touted his "ambitious agenda of interdisciplinary scholarship exploring relationships between law and contemporary European philosophy."

"All the way back to Aristotle and his book about rhetoric, there is a tradition of thinking about how to develop practical reasoning or practical wisdom," Mootz said, expounding on his approach. "It is not teaching students the law; it is teaching students how to be lawyers."

University of the Pacific Provost Maria Pallavicini hailed Mootz in a statement as a "visionary, leader, teacher and scholar" who is "practiced as a commercial litigator" and widely published.

"He is also a strong advocate for legal education in a liberal arts environment – a core tenet at Pacific McGeorge," she said.

Before joining the UNLV law faculty in 2008, Mootz taught at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law, the College of William and Mary's Marshall-Wythe School of Law, the Western New England School of Law and Dickinson College. Before studying at Duke, he earned a bachelor's degree in history at Notre Dame.

Mootz has presented academic symposiums on legal theory in Europe, Africa and South America and serves on the editorial advisory board for the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities.

Mootz will head a law school with more than 1,000 students and 52 full-time and 70 part-time faculty members. He was selected after a national search to replace the current dean, Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, who announced last spring she was stepping down after serving as dean for the past decade.

Mootz will take over July 1.

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