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Interviewed by Barbara Tabach.

Ann McGinley grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the third child in a family of four. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was a lawyer. It was because of her father that she became interested in civil rights. Ann attended college and majored in Spanish. She earned a master’s degree and taught in Spain for five years. Her brother and his wife were lawyers and she decided to go back to law school at the University of Pennsylvania. Ann did a two year clerkship for a federal judge, doing research and drafting opinions. She met her husband-to-be during this time and they mover to Minneapolis. Ann did commercial litigation and worked on a class action suit against the school system on behalf of the American Indian population. Her husband wanted to teach and was hired by Brooklyn Law School. Their first child was on the way and Ann studied for the bar in New Jersey. She then worked for a small firm in Labor and Employment Discrimination. A teaching job at Brooklyn Law School opened up and she worked part-time there for four or five years, meanwhile giving birth to two more children. It then seemed like the right time to make a career move, so Ann and her husband applied and were hired at Florida State in Tallahassee. After watching others being denied tenure and having experienced that denial themselves, they were ready to move on. A phone call from Carl Tobias inviting them to UNLV was followed up with interviews, and the McGinley’s made the move to Las Vegas. Ann and her family settled in Green Valley in 1999 during Carol Harter’s administration. Ann drafted the plan for a clinical program, which uses real clients to help train law students, and has helped build other programs for the law school. Ann now teaches employment law, employment discrimination, disabilities discrimination law, torts, and occasionally civil procedure. Her vision for the future of the law school is for it to continue with its social mission, and perhaps for a satellite campus to open at UNR. She is confident that the UNLV law school will continue to be a place where women can thrive.