Gift Builds Global Connections at Law School

Nina Stillman ’73 JD funds new international initiatives with a bequest through her IRA

When Nina G. Stillman ’73 JD first enrolled at Northwestern Law, she quickly noticed that most of her classmates had not traveled far for their legal education. “When I started law school in 1970, close to 90 percent of the students were from the Midwest, and a lot had never traveled,” she says. “That’s what it was like in those days, but I always thought interactions with foreign students were important.”

Stillman, a second-generation American whose grandparents came to the United States as young adults, had long been exposed to cross-cultural perspectives. “My father’s father dug ditches when he came over from Russia, and my father’s mother started working at 14,” she says. Ultimately, her family came to represent the American dream. “My grandparents saved up for a little grocery store and sent my father to college in the height of the Depression, and he ended up as an officer of a New York Stock Exchange company,” Stillman says.

The success story was not lost on her parents, who were “very much aware of how lucky we were to live the American dream,” she notes. “As a result, they were very generous people and raised me to believe ‘if you have, you give back.’”

Once Stillman found success as a lawyer—she became the first female partner at the law firm Vedder Price in 1980 and was a founding partner of the Chicago office of Morgan Lewis in 2004—she followed her parents’ example and established a Northwestern Law fund in their honor. The Melvin & Joyce Stillman International Program Fund, created in 1997, supports international programming at the Law School with a particular focus on faculty exchanges or student study abroad in Israel.

Stillman has assured the continuation of the fund by making a bequest from her IRA. At the end of her lifetime, the fund will receive a designated portion of the assets of the IRA, which transfer to the University tax-free.

“Nina Stillman’s generosity is helping us advance one of the pillars of our strategic plan: to ‘undertake new international initiatives,’” says James B. Speta, professor of law and associate dean for international initiatives. “The practice of law has followed business and humanistic issues into becoming a globalized profession and a globalized discussion. Northwestern has long provided an innovative education to international lawyers; the Law School increasingly offers global opportunities to US students ranging from study abroad to the International Team Projects to a more globalized curriculum. As one important part of the overall project, Northwestern Law has long had a close relationship with Israel, including a faculty exchange and an Executive LLM with Tel Aviv University.”

While the student body at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is much more diverse today than it was when Stillman was a student—members of the class of 2020 hail from 39 states and eight countries, and 23 countries are represented in the LLM program—her gift ensures that young students will continue to be exposed to outside perspectives. “The more interactions young people have with other cultures,” she says, “the more open they are to new ideas.”