University of St. Thomas School of Law’s Holloran Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a major gift from Jake Marvin, CEO of Marvin Companies, to establish the Steve Tourek and Jake Marvin Scholars Endowment.
The Holloran Center will use the endowment to create a program for law students, who will be called Tourek and Marvin Scholars.
The program will engage students in the mission and work of the Holloran Center, which provides innovative interdisciplinary research, curriculum development and programs on the topic of professional identity formation for law students and other disciplines.
“The students selected as scholars will have opportunities, beyond what all St. Thomas Law students already engage in, to gain experience working with us to change legal education and the profession, and to reflect with our help about their journey to becoming a lawyer and how they develop their professional identity,” said Neil Hamilton, professor at St. Thomas Law.
Marvin made the gift [amount not disclosed] to support professional ethics education and to honor his longtime employee attorney Steve Tourek, who has had a long relationship with St. Thomas Law.
Tourek has served as a mentor to law students in the school’s Mentor Externship Program for 23 years, including 10 years as a faculty mentor, and has been a guest speaker in the Ethical Leadership in Organizations class for 21 years.
Tourek says he became involved in legal education because of challenges he saw within the profession.
“The studies being published when I first began teaching demonstrated that lawyers suffered from rates of divorce, depression, mental illness, chemical dependency and suicide that were far higher than the population at large,” he said. “We were not particularly successful at integrating our professional identity, our personal identity, our life purpose and our faith with our roles as peacemakers and community builders as practicing lawyers. I desperately wanted to work with students to better prepare them for the practice and lives of purpose and meaning as integrated human beings.”
The Thomas E. Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions was established in 2006 with a mission to help the next generation of lawyers, much like students in medical school, for example, form professional identities with a moral core of responsibility and service to others.
These concepts are now deeply embedded into legal education at St. Thomas Law.
Professional formation, as part of a law school curriculum, develops in students the skills they will need to better serve their clients and maintain the integrity of the profession once they enter it. It also puts law students on a trajectory toward meaningful employment, because while they are in law school, they reflect upon the law as a vocation and explore the profession, inside and outside the classroom, to truly understand the role of a lawyer.
The Holloran Center’s work has impacted countless law students at St. Thomas and others nationally. Co-directors Neil Hamilton and Jerry Organ, through their scholarly work and collaboration with law schools across the country, and internationally, have contributed to the framework for the broader professional identity formation movement.
Since 2007, Hamilton has published 60 long articles and three books on professionalism and student professional identity formation.
Organ has published several articles as well and has been one of the principal investigators in an ongoing study of law student wellness. The National Jurist named him among the 20 most influential people in legal education in 2024.
“The work of the Holloran Center is focused on bringing and applying academic rigor and thoughtful discussion to the need for ethical leadership in legal practice and in business,” Tourek said.
