This fund was established in 2008, in memory and in honor of the former Dean of Tulane Law School, John R. Kramer. The fund recognizes Dean Kramer's lifelong commitment to the principles of equal justice and the practice of public interest law. The purpose of the fund is to support scholarships for Tulane JD students who express commitment to those same principles of public interest law.
A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Mr. Kramer was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University. After his graduation from law school, he worked with Thurgood Marshall while the future US Supreme Court justice was at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Subsequently, Mr. Kramer became counsel to US Representative Adam Clayton Powell on the House Committee on Education and Labor, handling anti-poverty legislation and the first Higher Education Act. As executive director of the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition in the late 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Kramer drafted much of the existing legislation on food stamps and school meals. He spent 10 years at Georgetown University as associate dean for clinical education. He was president of the Field Foundation from 1981 to 1991 and founding chair of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities from 1981 to 2002.
John Kramer was appointed dean of Tulane Law School in 1986, returning to the Tulane Law faculty in 1996. During his tenure as dean, he was largely responsible for making Tulane the first law school in the country to require community service of its students. He died in 2006.
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