Five years after real estate investor Jay Shidler's landmark gift to the University of Hawaii College of Business that now bears his name, Shidler has extended that giving to include the UH William S. Richardson School of Law, the law school recently announced.
Shidler, a UH alumnus, has donated $1 million in cash to initiate the Dean’s Innovation Fund.
"The Fund will allow UH Law School Dean Camille Nelson to bring into legal education the type of innovative approach that drives business," said the law school in a statement.
Reached by PBN to learn more about the gift and its future use, Shidler said the donation grew out of his experience helping to teach ethics courses to law students and MBA students.
"The are two rules to operating ethically in the world," said Shidler. "The second rule is easiest — keep your agreements. The first part is harder and getting more complex and that's knowing what your agreements are."
Looking at a business world that now embraces everything from novel cryptocurrencies to routine, but poorly understood, "user agreements" for software, Shidler felt it was necessary to support the law school as it develops programs or curricula to prepare future lawyers for such complexity.
Of special significance to Nelson is that the funding is unrestricted, giving her wide latitude to develop programming.
In a call with PBN, Nelson said, "We appreciate Jay's generosity, it's not often the case that people recognize that having discretion to be nimble when burgeoning needs arise is important for law schools. The Dean's Innovation Fund will help us think about how we create opportunities and initiatives in areas that are exciting for lawyers to engage with with — [issues such as] remote work, entrepreneurship underwritten by intellectual property law, climate justice and more."
Both Shidler and Nelson hope this one-time gift will inspire additional support from the community to help the law school "lean into the future more," said Nelson, as it goes into its 50th anniversary.
Shidler's support to UH since 2006 now totals $228 million, said the statement, plus the gift of ground leases to the "Shidler College of Business which could yield at least $7.2 billion during the life of the leases."
