A new fellowship at Michigan Law will help fund important postgraduate opportunities for masters of law students, while honoring a longtime champion of international students. The Virginia Gordan LLM Public Service Fellowship is named for the first assistant dean for international affairs at Michigan Law.
The fellowship will support postgraduate transnational public service and public interest work at international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), foreign or international courts, and other globally significant public service organizations outside the United States.
“It will give interested LLMs an opportunity to pursue the kind of postgraduate opportunities that are quite difficult to get funded,” says Gordan. “And these opportunities are very often key to launching or furthering people’s careers in their areas of interest. I’m tremendously honored that a fellowship in my name has been established for this purpose.”
Gordan started at the Law School in 1981 as assistant dean of students. Her broad set of responsibilities in that position included work with international students. In 1996, then-Dean Jeffrey Lehman asked her to serve as the school’s first assistant dean for international affairs, with a mandate to build on and expand the Law School's strong foundation in international and comparative legal studies.
“For almost two decades in her path-breaking role, Virginia was truly the international face of the Law School,” says Evan Caminker, the Branch Rickey Collegiate Professor of Law. “I learned early in my deanship to accept that when I traveled overseas to meet a foreign legal luminary—a leading lawyer, government official, even Supreme Court justice— they would likely greet me with, ‘I’m pleased to meet you, now where is Dean Virginia?’” Caminker served as dean of the Law School from 2003 to 2013, while Gordan was assistant dean for international affairs.
“Here at home, our international students respected, loved, and—a teeny bit—feared Virginia,” Caminker adds. “She did not pamper or placate, but she advocated for and supported them with unlimited energy and relentless passion.”
Gordan retired from the Law School in 2013 and went on to work as a reporter at NPR affiliate Michigan Radio (now Michigan Public) for 10 years. She calls it “the privilege of a lifetime” to have spent so many years interacting every day with talented students from around the world.
Virginia Gordan, former assistant dean for international affairsMichigan Law has sought to bring cross-border perspectives to the study and practice of law in order to prepare its graduates, both US and foreign, to be able to effectively and creatively address the problems of an ever-more-interconnected world,” she says. “Our overseas students, scholars, and faculty play an important role in this endeavor.
The first two fellowship recipients are Viktoria Baumgartl, LLM ’25, and current SJD candidate Dmytro Soldatenko, LLM ’25. Soldatenko, from Ukraine, used his fellowship to work at the International Law Commission in Geneva. Baumgartl’s fellowship supported her summer work at the AIRE Centre, an NGO based in London.
“One of the reasons I applied to Michigan was the chance to connect academic studies with practical experience through international fellowship opportunities,” says Baumgartl, an Austrian scholar. “This fellowship was the perfect opportunity.”
The Law School now hopes to grow the fellowship with gifts from alumni and friends, so that it can provide such opportunities for other scholars for years to come.
“Having a public service fellowship for international students named after a much-loved former staff member reflects our deep respect for a transformational former colleague, our highly individualized support for our graduate law students, and our commitment to training legal professionals who can make the world a better place,” says Eric Christiansen, the Law School’s current assistant dean for international affairs.
“When we first announced the fellowship at the Michigan Law Japanese Alumni Dinner, we received a very enthusiastic response. Since that announcement this summer, we have already had some very promising interest from donors, which we expect will continue.”
If you are interested in making a gift to support the Virginia Gordan LLM Public Service Fellowship, contact Jeff Jelinski, director of Law School giving, at [email protected].
