Campus News

Law Center welcomes new dean

Baynes mug

Leonard M. Baynes joins UH as the new Dean of the UH Law Center. |Courtesy of UH Law Center

The UH Law Center welcomed its ninth dean, Leonard M. Baynes. Holding a national reputation as a communications law scholar with specializations in business, media and diversity issues, Baynes was previously the inaugural director of the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development at St. John’s University School of Law.

“Leonard Baynes has a real vision for what a top law school can be in an urban setting,” said Paula Myrick Short, UH provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, in a Houston Chronicle article.

Baynes has also served as chair of three committees for the Association of American Law Schools, as scholar-in-residence at the Federal Communications Commission, as in-house counsel at NYNEX Corp, and as an associate at the Wall Street office of Gaston and Snow LLP.

Receiving his B.S. from New York University, and J.D. and M.B.A. from Columbia University. Baynes was awarded the Earl Warren Scholarship and the COGME Fellowship at Columbia, where he also served as associate editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. After law school, Baynes served as a Law Clerk to Federal District Court Judge Clifford Scott Green in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

“He has the enthusiasm to pursue that vision and is fully supported by the Law Center and the Houston legal community,” Short said.

Baynes has written more than 25 law review articles on corporate law, communications law and diversity, and is in the final stages of co-authoring the case book, “Telecommunications Law: Convergence and Competition,” to be published by Wolters Kluwer.

In addition, Baynes has been an expert witness at the FCC Federal Advisory Committee for Diversity in broadcast ownership. He was inducted into the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council Hall of Fame, where former FCC Commissioner and MMTC Chair Henry Rivera described Baynes as “a champion for diversity.”

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