Early career After law school, Leebron was a
law clerk to U.S. circuit judge
Shirley Hufstedler of the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1979 to 1980. He taught as a professor at the
UCLA School of Law for a semester. Leebron then entered private practice from 1981 to 1983 as an associate at the New York firm
Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He then re-entered academia as a law professor at
New York University and the director of NYU's International Legal Studies Program from 1983 to 1989. In 1989 he joined the faculty at
Columbia Law School, where he became dean in 1996. He became President of Rice University in 2004. As a professor, he taught and published in areas of corporate finance, international economic law, human rights, privacy and torts. He was also a co-author of a textbook on human rights, though most recently has written about problems in international trade law. He is member of the
New York State Bar and, currently inactive, the
Hawaii and
Pennsylvania bars. He is on the American Law Deans Association Board of Directors. He has served on the
Association of American Law Schools Committee on Nominations. He is also a member of the
American Law Institute (ex officio), the
Council on Foreign Relations, the
American Society of International Law, the board of directors of the
IMAX Corporation and the editorial board of
Foundation Press. on the first of June in 2004. Under Leebron's leadership, the campus added two new residential colleges; the 10-story
BioScience Research Collaborative, where scientists and educators from Rice and other
Texas Medical Center institutions work together; a new recreation and wellness center; an additional food servery; a central campus pavilion that serves as a meeting and study place; an updated sports arena; a new physics building; and the Public Art Program, a presidential initiative that added art across campus, although the university suffered a disappointing setback when merger talks between
Baylor College of Medicine and Rice stalled. As president, Leebron pushed the creation of a vision for the university, called the Vision for the Second Century. Leebron set forth a plan for expansion, calling for opinions from the Rice community. The vision called for expanding the undergraduate body to around 3800, adding two more residential colleges and expanding the current ones. The new students would mostly come from outside Texas, while the number of students from Texas would hold steady at around 1300 students. In November 2008, Leebron traveled to
Iran as part of an academic tour sponsored by the
Association of American Universities. On this four-day tour, he visited
Sharif University, Iran's top engineering school, where he took part in an open question and answer session with Iranian students. Leebron compared his visit to the opening of relations with
China during the 1970s. On May 26, 2021, Leebron announced that he would resign as President of Rice effective June 30, 2022. == Personal life ==