THE ADVOCATE 495
VOL. 80 PART 4 JULY 2022
ON THE
FRONT COVER
NGAI PINDELL
By D. Michael Bain, Q.C.
It was once remarked in these pages (about the third dean of what is
now the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC) that “until recently,
to be sentenced to serve as dean of a faculty at a Canadian university
meant servitude for life, with no prospect of remission of sentence
for good conduct. The modern practise, however, is to sentence a dean to
serve for a fixed term.”1 Ngai Pindell probably has the good sense not to take
such cynicism literally; he began his term (or sentence) as dean of the Peter
A. Allard School of Law in November 2021. He is the ninth dean since the
law school’s inception 77 years ago and at least the sixth born outside of
Canada.2
Dean Pindell grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, an ethnically and linguistically
diverse suburb northwest of Washington, D.C. During his time in
Gaithersburg, he was involved in what he describes as “normal suburban
kid stuff” and took an interest in track and field. This interest blossomed
more recently in 2019, when he ran the half marathon at the Rock & Roll
Marathon in Las Vegas in under two hours.
Eventually, he moved to Durham, North Carolina (about four hours away
from Gaithersburg) to take his undergraduate degree at Duke University,
where he majored in economics. While at Duke, he became a lifelong fan of
the university’s basketball team, the Blue Devils, after the team won two
NCAA March Madness titles during his four years. He applied to Harvard
Law School to “learn a bit about how the world worked”, obtaining his J.D.
in 1996. He has conceded that he may not have received all of the answers
he was looking for, but what he did discover was a desire to use the power
of the law to transform lives and communities. If he were asked early in law
school what he would do with his future, he would have mentioned a career