Professor Brook Baker ’76 retired this spring from the School of Law’s faculty. From student to graduate to faculty member, he has exemplified both Northeastern Law’s leadership in experiential education and our social justice mission.  Professor Emerita Emily Spieler reflects on his impact and legacy. 

I met Brook Baker in 1966, when we were undergraduates. At his core, Brook now is the same person he was then: passionate in his commitment to justice while demonstrating an understanding that the pursuit of justice requires perseverance and constancy of purpose. He was, and is, caring about the people around him. He and his wife, Judith, also a college classmate, are exemplars of a committed and supportive partnership.

Brook’s adult life has been intertwined with our law school. He graduated from Northeastern in 1976. Just a few years later, Mike Meltsner, then dean, recruited him to join the faculty to help develop a revolutionary first-year skills training program. At a time when few law schools offered anything but podium courses in the first year, Brook helped set us on a path to the enriched curriculum we have today, including both the first-year writing program (now evolved into Legal Skills in Social Context) and an experiential negotiation course — a course he has continued to teach. Within the faculty, he has always advocated for students, for ways to address embedded issues of institutional racism and for our law school’s historic commitment to advance the public good.

Brook’s interests and commitment go far beyond the walls of the law school. Ignited by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa and vulnerable people’s inability to access medication, Brook threw himself into the international campaign for broadened access to medicines. He became an acclaimed analyst and critic of the often dense and invisible policies that limit access to medicines around the world, developing expertise in intellectual property rights, trade, investor-state dispute settlement and regulatory policy and becoming involved in a range of international NGOs, including as a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project).

Brook’s commitment to this work does not appear to be lagging, and I doubt it will abate with retirement. I am certain that as he probes his status as professor emeritus and treasures his time with Judith, his sons and his grandchildren, he will continue to engage in the pursuit of justice.

—Professor Emerita Emily Spieler