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Professor Richard C. Schneider receives the 2018 Joseph Branch Excellence in Teaching Award

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By Lisa Snedeker

Office of Communications and Public Relations

February 15, 2018

Photo of Wake Forest Law Professor Dick Schneider

Dick Schneider’s academic and professional activities are multifaceted and national and international in scope. Besides his environmental and international business law courses, he also teaches a course called Law, Literature, and Culture.

The Joseph Branch Excellence in Teaching Award was presented to Associate Dean for International Affairs and Professor of Law Richard C. Schneider by Provost Rogan Kersh at Wake Forest University’s Founder’s Day Convocation on Feb. 15, 2018, in Wait Chapel.

Provost Kersh described Professor Schneider, who is conversant in five languages, as the consummate intellectual “And his students are better for it…he has grown the ranks and increased opportunities for foreign students (at the law school) as well as increased opportunities for our domestic students to study abroad in China, Italy, Spain and Austria.”

Professor Schneider’s academic and professional activities are multifaceted and national and international in scope. Besides his environmental and international business law courses, he also teaches a course called “Law, Literature, and Culture.” He directs the law school’s Vienna Summer Program and works in that capacity closely with faculty at the University of Vienna.

“I’m delighted to announce that we will present Dick Schneider the Joseph Branch Excellence in Teaching Award this year,” Dean Suzanne Reynolds (JD ’77) wrote in an email announcement.  “A student in his Cross-Border Transactions course last semester called him ‘a legend.’ In his property course last spring, students complained about how much he made them read while acknowledging, ‘Laughed more than any class.’  His ‘Law, Literature, and Culture’ class regularly changes lives.  A much-deserved recognition of a wonderfully gifted teacher.”

Professor Schneider has followed Russia closely throughout his career and advises on a number of environmental matters in his capacity as Legal Chair of the North Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club.  The North Carolina Chapter recently won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has served on the Environmental Committee of the North Carolina State Bar Association and was a board member of the American Bar Association (ABA) Central and East European Law Initiative. After law school, Professor Schneider went to work for Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York and ib Brussels, where he did a wide range of international transactions.
The Joseph Branch Excellence in Teaching Award was established in 1985 to honor Wake Forest alumnus Joseph Branch (JD ’38, LLD ’83) upon his retirement from the North Carolina Supreme Court.  Branch embodied the humanistic, student-centered approach to legal education that is the law school’s heritage. Recipients are chosen from the School of Law faculty on the basis of outstanding teaching and service to the legal profession.

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