$10 million gift from Emily and Stephen Mendel builds a home for public justice at law school
Nearly fifty years after they met as law students in Hempstead, Emily and Stephen Mendel have given $10 million to establish the Mendel Center for Public Justice at Hofstra University’s Maurice A. Deane School of Law.
The gift is shaped by memory.
The center aims to ease a pressure the couple knew well: the debt that pushes idealistic new lawyers away from public service.
Both Mendels were nontraditional students when they entered Hofstra Law, and both graduated in 1977.
Emily arrived as a single mother of two preschoolers.
When childcare fell through, she brought her daughters to class, where they especially liked Torts with Professor Aaron Twerski.
She later worked as his research assistant and edited his writing on conflict of laws. Stephen paid his way through law school with a bicycle shop he had opened after college, along with scholarships, jobs, and loans.
While still a student, he worked at the ACLU and clerked in the civil rights division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Hofstra Law taught them that lawyers have a duty to make the world better.
But the bills that followed graduation made public-sector careers hard to pursue.
“Our experience taught us the value of a Hofstra Law education and the ways in which financial pressures can limit the paths available to new lawyers,” the Mendels said.
“We are proud to help make the Mendel Center possible so that students committed to public justice have the freedom and resources to pursue that calling and build careers that help bend the arc toward justice.”
The new center becomes the law school’s central home for public service. It brings together scholarships, fellowships, summer stipends, mentoring, career advising, experiential learning, and public interest programming.
Students will also find placements through clinics, externships, pro bono work, and partnerships with legal services organizations, government agencies, and nonprofits across Long Island, New York City, and the country. Dean Jenny Roberts calls public service central to how Hofstra educates lawyers.
“Through the Mendel Center, students will work alongside practitioners and community partners to understand unmet legal needs and develop the skills to address them,” she said.
“Emily and Stephen’s extraordinary generosity will help us prepare generations of lawyers who see service as an essential part of their professional responsibility.”
The center’s executive director is Professor Jennifer Gundlach, who already holds the Emily and Stephen Mendel Distinguished Professorship, a chair the couple endowed for a faculty leader on access to justice.
Franca Sachs serves as the center’s director. Its core program is the Emily and Stephen Mendel Public Justice Scholarship, which the couple launched a year earlier.
It awards tuition scholarships to first-year students committed to public interest law, renewable each year for students who maintain that commitment.
Every Mendel Scholar is paired with a Hofstra Law alumni mentor who has spent a career in public service.
Scholars can also apply for Mendel Summer Fellowship stipends, which let them take unpaid summer internships at public interest organizations without giving up a paycheck.
The gift caps a career that took the Mendels far from Long Island and then, in spirit, brought them back.
After graduation, they moved to San Francisco and married two years later.
Emily joined the firm Hanson Bridgett, where she focused on healthcare and hospital-system reorganizations and acquisitions.
Frustrated at being one of only two women lawyers at the firm, she started her own practice.
For the next twenty-five years, she represented major hospitals and health systems in commercial transactions and large technology projects.
Many of her clients were religious orders that ran hospitals. That work took her into unusual territory, from questions of sanctuary for immigrants to real estate dealings with the Vatican conducted in Latin.
After retiring from law, she became a theater and art critic.
For years she has reviewed Bay Area stages for Berkeleyside, culturevulture, and Theatrius.
Stephen’s path ran through Silicon Valley.
He began by representing technology startups at a San Francisco firm, then became general counsel and later executive vice president of Molecular Design, which he guided through its sale to a British conglomerate.
He co-founded Ithaca Software with colleagues from Cornell and served as its CEO. Inc. 500 named it one of the fastest-growing private companies of the 1990s, and Autodesk later acquired it.
He planned to retire but returned as founding managing director of In-Q-Tel, the venture firm created to bring emerging technology to the U.S. intelligence community. Its work became central to counterterrorism efforts after September 11.
When he left, the CIA honored him for his “visionary leadership, investment acumen, and commitment to mission.”
Today he is a venture partner at Alsop Louie Partners and has long served on the board of DuckDuckGo, among other companies.
The $10 million commitment builds on more than a decade of steady giving to the school.
The Mendels created the Mendel Family Endowed Scholarship for entering students chosen for academic achievement or financial need.
Later, they endowed the Emily and Stephen Mendel Distinguished Professorship. They helped establish Hofstra Law’s Pro Se Legal Assistance Program at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, which helps people who come to federal court without a lawyer.
In the university’s most recent fiscal year, the honor roll listed them among donors at the $250,000-and-above level.
Hofstra Law is also a family tradition: their daughter Sarah Schulman, one of the two little girls who once sat in on Torts, earned her own law degree there in 1994.
The school has inducted both Mendels into its Hall of Fame.
Their giving reaches into the Bay Area arts and Jewish cultural life they have long called home.
They support San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum and belong to its Legacy Society.
They are also listed among the donors to Berkeley’s Central Works theater company, a natural fit for a couple who spend so much time in the audience.
The Mendel Center turns that long relationship into an institution.
Two students who once had to weigh conviction against their loans are giving new generations of Hofstra lawyers a way to choose public service on its merits.