A steadfast source of wisdom, warmth, and guidance at Penn Carey Law for 35 years, Verrier retired from the Law School in 2024.
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Let’s step inside and see what makes this place so special.
Golkin Hall Lobby: We’re standing now in the Golkin Hall lobby. As you can see, this space is very intentionally filled with natural light and other architectural features that invite the community in. Facing the University of Pennsylvania, we invite them in to do interdisciplinary work alongside us. All of our buildings here surround this gorgeous outdoor courtyard heavily used by students, faculty, and staff alike.
We have Silverman Hall, built at the turn of the last century, Gittis Hall in the 1960s, and Tannenbaum Hall in 1994, and this building—Golkin Hall—opened in 2012 to a lot of accolades, including getting LEED Gold status for the use of natural light and other ecological features. We have everything in this building. We have faculty offices, classrooms, and administrative space. Down below us is the Fitts Auditorium, heavily used for a host of great speakers and even as a classroom and our moot courtroom.
There are also a lot of student study spaces, and all varieties of students and study spaces matching how students want to study today.
Tannenbaum Hall: So now we’re on the second floor of Tannenbaum Hall and the entranceway, which we call the gateway to Biddle Law Library. Biddle Law Library takes up four floors of Tannenbaum Hall, making our resources accessible to all of our students. Our librarians are staffed here in a way that makes them also very accessible to students, and our librarians are partners in both our students’ education and our faculty scholarship.
The library has one of the largest collections of law libraries in the country, and all of those resources are available to every member of the community. The library also has a lot of various study places for students. Students can study here on the second and third floors, which are more spaces where people can talk and work together. And the fourth and fifth floors have great views of the Center City of Philadelphia. That’s our more quiet space for concentrated study.
We’re standing here in the Clock, one of the law school’s primary crossroads, where faculty, staff, and students see each other, meet with one another, and work together on a daily basis. It’s right off our beautiful courtyard. So it’s infused with natural light, and it invites people in to get their work done together. Also immediately adjacent to this space are all our student service organizations.
We have the admissions offices for our JD, LLM, and ML program, Financial Aid. We have the Toll Public Interest Center, our Career Office, Student Affairs, and Global Engagement.
Gittis Hall: We’re now coming around the courtyard and into Gittis Hall. In Gittis Hall, we have four classrooms we consider our workhorse classrooms. You know that line about learning to think like a lawyer in law school? Well, this is where it happens. The faculty members will assign work. Students will read it. They’ll come in, and a faculty member will ask students to think about it. Think about it again. Analyze it yet again. And all that work is done here in the classroom, in front of each other, so students can see and hear one another and work together on becoming lawyers.
The Goat: We’re now standing in what we call the Goat, and I’m going to get to that in a moment. But this is one of the major crossroads, we keep talking about crossroads, where everyone in this interdisciplinary community gets the chance to collaborate and cross paths with one another on a daily basis. The building leads into Gittis Hall, Golkin Hall, and, behind me, Silverman Hall.
You can also see again the array of student study spaces that are available. Now, why do we call it the Goat? Well, when this building was first constructed, the Gittis Wing, the building committee commissioned a Chinese artist to come up with something that would represent the law school. This goat was donated by the donors to this building. And the Chinese tradition is that if you rub the goat, it will let you know if the person charged is guilty or innocent. It’s become our mascot, and it’s beloved by all who enter these halls.
Silverman Hall: Okay, we’re now standing on the Great Hall steps in beautiful Silverman Hall. The University of Pennsylvania had its classes in Center City, moved to West Philadelphia around the turn of the last century, and the law department was one of the first departments to move onto campus. This building was designed by Cope and Stewardson and built between 1900 and 1904.
The rumor has it that artisans from Italy and elsewhere came over to do this gorgeous plasterwork by hand, living in the building while it was constructed, and it opened for business in 1904. At that time, all classrooms were in the building, all administrative spaces, and our faculty offices. Now, we use the building for our faculty offices. Our faculty lounge is right behind us here. We also have classrooms up on the second floor and administrative spaces. On the ground floor is the Gittis Legal Clinic and also some of the diverse student study spaces that we’ve been showing throughout the tour.
Okay, so now we’re here in a Silverman Hall classroom. As we talked about, Silverman Hall was originally the library for the law school. And you can see this gorgeous architecture, which speaks to the seriousness, again, of purpose of being in these rooms. We took the opportunity to renovate them into Socratic classrooms, some more Socratic classrooms, where again, the faculty member has the opportunity to move around through the space and students can both see and hear one another really well as they’re doing their analysis, doing their explication of the work at hand.
We have a classroom like this across the hall, which seats about 50. This classroom seats about 80. They are very popular classrooms. The acoustics are wonderful. We’re right here on busy Philadelphia streets, and the sound is perfect.
So now you know some of the amazing things that are going on behind these doors. We hope you’ll have a chance to come and check it out for yourself.
Original source can be found here.