Stacy Lynn Leeds

FAYETTEVILLE - As with any good college student, laundry weighed heavily on Stacy Leeds’ mind.

Some two decades before she became the dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law, Leeds was a junior at Washington University in St. Louis. She was unsure of what she was going to do after graduating, but was considering teaching and coaching girls basketball.

Along with one of her teammates on Washington’s basketball team, Leeds decided to take a course in the university’s social work department. Their primary motivation - really, their sole motivation - was that the class was filled with master’s degree students.

That is, the kind of students who lived in off-campus housing. The kind of students who would let a pair of undergrads come over and use their washer and dryer.

“Your life gets changed by the people you accidentally hang out with,” Leeds says. “The final project was having you give testimony, kind of a mock Senate hearing. You had to pick a point to advocate. It sparked my advocacy skills.”

The class dealt with issues facing American Indians, matters like tribal governments and the protection of Indian children. Leeds found it fascinating.

Born in Tulsa, Leeds had always been riveted by history and politics, and as someone who was American Indian herself, she connected with the subject matter. Leeds’ father is Cherokee, a descendant of the Indians who were forcibly relocated across the southern United States on the Trail of Tears.

By the time the course was over, Leeds was preparing to take the Law School Admission Test, and her career was taking shape.

“[Washington University] is a highly ranked university, so there were a lot of people there who were very intelligent, people who were really going after things,” says Laurie Schlueb of Missoula, Mont., a friend since college. “Stacy wasn’t just bright and intelligent; she just comes off, and came off then, as someone who’s got their act together, knows what they’re doing and makes it happen.”

In the years since taking that fateful course, Leeds has gone to law school, practiced law and clerked. She has taught at law schools at the University of North Dakota and the University of Kansas, at both places heading centers that dealt with American Indian legal issues.

She has served as a judge for several Indian tribes, sitting on the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court, and has gotten involved with issues facing the Cherokee Nation and Indians across the United States.

Since 2011, she has been tackling her most challenging task yet, serving as the dean of the UA School of Law, having been offered the position after a nationwide search that lasted nearly a year.

In March, U.S. News and World Report ranked the school of law as tied for 68th out of 194 nationally, and tied for 36th among all public law schools. It was named the 14th best value in legal education by The National Jurist. These are all historic bests for the school of law.

Leeds insists that she is but a part of the reason the school of law has risen in the rankings; that it’s a team effort, with much of the credit due to her predecessors as dean and many others who work at the school of law.

“She approaches [her job] with great determination, but she is a great listener and a great thinker,” says Patti Cox, the senior director of development and external relations for the law school. “The outcome has been pretty astounding; she’s been able to keep everyone on a common goal of having a superior school of law.

“She’s terrific. That’s it in a nutshell. She’s very bright, compassionate, and pursues goals with lot of grace.” ACTIVE LIFESTYLE

Leeds hopes to run in the Kansas City Marathon in October.

“‘Run’ will be a loose term,” Leeds jokes. “It’s going to be slow, from Point A to Point B. I won’t call myself a runner; I call myself a finisher.”

Run, jog or stroll, Leeds is determined to go the full 26.2 miles, which will mark the second time she has completed a marathon in recent years. At age 41, Leeds is physically fit, a change from a few years back, when she’d had her son Hunter and was wondering whether she would ever fit in her jeans again.

Exercise is an important part of Leeds’ daily life, keeping her lean and providing her the with energy to tackle the myriad tasks facing her at the school of law, while leaving enough left over to devote plenty of attention to Hunter, 5. (Leeds is divorced, and has custody of her son.)

It took her until she was around 40 to figure out that she’s her happiest when she’s exercising regularly, and when she has a goal in her sights. Since she can’t take part in defensive drills to get ready for her next basketball game anymore, completing a marathon - and doing it more quickly than the last time - is her goal.

“Stacy is one of those people who seems to have 28 hours a day when everyone else has 24,” says Melanie Wilson, the associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Kansas School of Law and a former colleague of Leeds. “She can lead [a school of law], do keynote speaking, write books … I’m telling you, she has more hours in the day than the rest of us!”

Regular exercise was a big part of Leeds’ life all the way through college. She played basketball throughout high school, then played four years of college basketball at Washington University, an NCAA Division III program.She also played two years of college tennis, but says she wasn’t much of a tennis player, more of “a basketball player who happened to hold a tennis racket.”

Until the fateful social work class in college, Leeds was pretty well convinced she was going to teach and coach girls basketball at the high school level. While in law school, she was cured of the coaching bug when she volunteered as a junior high girls basketball coach - the manic nature of girls that age did the trick - but there’s no reason to doubt that she would have succeeded on the sidelines.

The best basketball coaches are those who know their X’s and O’s, coming into each game with a strategy to exploit the opponent’s weaknesses. At the same time, they’ve got to be someone who keeps calm under pressure, someone who can draw up a last-second play when the fans are screaming.

“She’s very comfortable under pressure,” Schlueb says. “One thing I admire about Stacy is her decisiveness. They’re not rash decisions [she makes], but thoughtful, and she just has this ability to handle a tremendous amount of stress and responsibility, and handle it with grace.

“That’s why she stands apart from others, and why she can take on a job like dean of a law school.”INDIAN ISSUES

Leeds knew she wanted to do two things after earning her bachelor’s degree in history: go to law school and get closer to home.

In 1994, she enrolled at the University of Tulsa College of Law, not far from her hometown of Muskogee. The school appealed to her in part because of its location, but also because it would allow her to study the two areas that interested her, American Indian law and natural resources (specifically, oil and gas).

Early in law school, she imagined she would become a practicing lawyer, but by the end of her second year, becoming a law professor was an increasingly appealing option.

“That came strictly out of Law Review,” she explains. “I found I really enjoyed the research and writing side of it. It came back to that always wanting to be a teacher and coach thing.”

During her final year at Tulsa, Leeds won a fellowship, affording her the opportunity to go to the University of Wisconsin Law School and earn a Master of Laws degree (LLM). She took about two years off between Tulsa and Wisconsin, however, to practice law - predominantly on federal and tribal issues - and clerk for a Creek Nation judge.

At Wisconsin, she worked toward her LLM and readied her dissertation on tribal court judgments and how they were received by state and federal courts that later came into contact with them. Legal issues facing American Indians have always been extremely important to Leeds, motivating her to preside on the bench for several tribes.

“It runs throughout everything she does,” Wilson says. “At her core, she is someone who is supportive of young people, especially Native Americans - doing speaking engagements, writing books, running [legal] centers.

“She does many things to advance Native American issues, and to support and advance society generally.”

Leeds’ concern for legal issues facing American Indians led her to the University of North Dakota School of Law in 2000. She was an assistant professor there, as well as the director of its Northern Plains Indian Law Center.

The center had begun shortly before Leeds’ arrival, she says, but it had never had a tenure-track faculty member heading it.

“It was an important step, and one I was ready to take,” she says. “I went up there for that.

“Working directly with tribes was the key. We were doing a lot of stuff outside the typical law-school experience that was directly helpful to the tribes, a lot of judicial education, outreach, that kind of stuff.”CLOSE TO HOME

North Dakota was a great place to work, but it wasn’t where Leeds wanted to spend the rest of her life.

She loved the school and people she worked with, but the winters were bitterly cold. And it was far away from Tahlequah, Okla., where she had built a house in 2002.

She still has the house in Tahlequah, located next door to her parents (“next door” meaning five or six acres away). It’s her escape, the place she retreats to once a month and clears her mind.

“She can relax, take a break, float down the river,” Schlueb says. “She’s pretty plugged in from the demands of her job. … I’m always amazed at her ability to slide in and out of worlds, from work life to her personal life.”

Leeds stayed at North Dakota until 2003, when she joined the faculty at the University of Kansas School of Law. She was there until 2011, directing its Tribal Law and Government Center and ultimately rising to the position of interim associate dean for academic affairs.

During the time she was at North Dakota and Kansas, she served as a judge for several Indian tribes. By the time she accepted the Arkansas position, she was presiding on four courts, two in Kansas and two in Oklahoma.

In many ways, she explains, the tribal courts operate in a similar manner as regular courts do. Yet there are some differences, between the Indian courts and regular courts, and among the courts of different tribes.

Nearly every Indian law professor winds up being a judge for at least one tribe during his career. What’s less common is for a professor to serve on so many, for so long.

“There’s this legitimacy issue with tribal courts,” she says. “Outside courts are constantly saying, ‘Are they real courts? Are they unbiased? Who are their judges?’ Tribes suffer from lot of external pressure, so they want to get people who are well recognized in that field to serve in those roles.”

Leeds stepped down from all four courts when she accepted the position at Arkansas because she felt she needed to fully devote herself to the role of dean. She was impressed with the direction the law school was headed, and says her goal has been simple at Arkansas: To keep moving.

That doesn’t mean improving in the rankings, although she knows that’s good publicity. She means continuously getting better.

“I swear I’ve never seen anybody manage conflict as well as she does,” Cox says. “She really believes in expanding opportunities for students. She has an important job, and she works hard at it, yet she has a wicked sense of humor. She’s just a very nice person.”

Having settled in at Arkansas, Leeds has begun to get involved with American Indian issues once again. She’s serving a term on the National Commission on Indian Trust Administration and Reform, which is within the U.S. Department of the Interior. She’s also the chairman of the Cherokee Nation Gaming Commission.

Both of these are manageable, and they are important to her. They are her way of providing service to Indians, and her tribe in particular.

“Really, this is just the beginning of her career,” Wilson says. “Who knows what she’s going to accomplish? Here she has become dean of a prominent law school early in her career, she’s on nationwide committees, and she’s not even 45 yet.”SELF PORTRAIT Stacy Lynn Leeds

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Dec. 1, 1971, in Tulsa

OCCUPATION: Dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law

FAMILY: son Hunter

MY FAVORITE SCHOOL SUBJECT WAS history.

THE SUPREME COURT CASE I FOLLOWED MOST LAST TERM WAS the Baby Girl adoption case.

THE BEST ADVICE I EVER RECEIVED WAS “life is too short.”

SOMETHING I’D LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT is other cultures around the world and that’s why I intend to continue to travel extensively.

MY SECRET TALENT IS unrelenting driving stamina for long road trips.

THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT DEANS IS that they are the boss of the faculty.

MY IMMEDIATE GOAL IS to keep my work and my life as well-balanced as possible.

MY DOWN-THE-ROAD GOAL IS to have no regrets when it comes to my loved ones.

WHEN I AM RUNNING INSIDE, I LISTEN TO an absolute hodgepodge. Classic country, followed by new alternative, followed by blues/rock and sometimes NPR radio shows.

WHAT I MISS ABOUT BEING A JUDGE IS the solitude of deliberations and decision-making.

A WORD TO SUM ME UP: grounded