“Teaching is my calling. It seems to me I was always destined to be a professor,” said Interim President and Dean Jeff Rensberger, who took the helm of South Texas Law last summer while a national search was conducted for the law school’s next leader. “I majored in English. I read and analyzed hard texts, and I really enjoyed it. I thought I would be an English professor someday.”
As he was graduating cum laude from Wabash College in 1980, pondering his future, he remembered being mesmerized in May 1973 by the Watergate hearings, which were televised and watched by a worldwide audience. “I was intrigued and fascinated by the participants in those important proceedings. And they were lawyers — nearly all of them,” he said.
Rensberger’s academic and career interests were leaning in the direction of jurisprudence. He enrolled at Indiana University School of Law, ultimately serving as editor-in-chief of the Indiana Law Review and graduating magna cum laude. Unlike many fellow students, he enjoyed law school. And he continued to think about teaching, even as he became a law clerk for the Hon. Leroy J. Contie, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Akron, Ohio.
“It was an intense two years of tremendous learning about various kinds of law,” Rensberger said. “The court heard everything — criminal cases, labor law disputes, government benefits issues, civil cases involving insurance companies, and other commercial matters.” It was an enriching environment for a curious young attorney with an academic nature.
After his clerkship, Rensberger was an associate at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago. He handled commercial litigation, but his thoughts kept coming back to academia.
“I really, really liked learning,” he said. “Being a law professor gives an attorney the opportunity to continue learning through research and writing about interesting issues. It gives you the chance to teach students how to teach themselves, and that is critical because being a lawyer means being a lifetime learner.”
Rensberger joined the faculty at South Texas College of Law Houston in 1988 as an assistant professor. By 1994 he was a professor of law, and in 2021 he was appointed as the Charles Weigel II Research Professor of Conflict of Laws. Along the way, he served as vice president and associate dean for academic affairs, and then as vice president for strategic planning and institutional research.
When approached to become the interim president and dean, Rensberger felt it was a pinnacle moment. “I was ready to retire after 35 years. But how better to end my law school career?”
Slated to hold the law school steady until July 2025, when the new leader will step in, Rensberger is enjoying the new pace of his life as the chief problem solver. “My overarching responsibility in this busy and big job is to be able to hand off a happy, healthy, high functioning law school to my successor.”
