Crystal Wise
Says Bobby Ahdieh: "My wife and children keep me young, and give me a better reason than I could ever ask for, for wanting to make the world a better place. I also am deeply interested in how our educational system — at all levels — can do a better job of fostering opportunity for all.
As any good academic, Bobby Ahdieh is always listening and learning.
For example, when he moved his family here five years ago from Atlanta’s Emory University, he was under the impression there were only four geographic indicators.
“Now I know there are five,” he says laughing. “East, west, north, south, and Texas. It’s its own geographic indicator.”
Especially when your destination is Texas A&M. The Aggies will let you know.
Ahdieh is dean of the Texas A&M Law School in Fort Worth and vice president for Professional Schools & Programs at A&M. He is a member of Fort Worth Inc.’s The 400, the list of those most influential citizens in Fort Worth.
He is certainly one of the more fascinating people who roam among us. He is a dynamo, particularly as it concerns his vocation of advancing human knowledge.
Ahdieh is prestigiously educated, a Princeton man and graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public International Affairs who was later trained in the law at Yale.
He clerked for Judge James R. Browning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before a stint in the U.S. Department of Justice.
He has taught at Princeton, as well as Columbia and Georgetown law schools.
While still in law school, Ahdieh published one of the seminal treatments of the constitutional transformation of post-Soviet revolutionary Russia: Russia's Constitutional Revolution — Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy.
In addition to the book itself, a small stack of Russian newspapers in his office from that time in the early 1990s, which trumpet headlines of history, serve as evidence of another time and place full of the anticipation of hope.
Other favorite items in his office are blueprints of Texas A&M-Fort Worth, the planned Tier 1 campus. Construction has started with the Law and Education Building.
This was Ahdieh’s brainchild that he brought to civic leaders, who embraced this big, big idea.
The campus will be an intellectual hub of law, engineering, technology, and health sciences. It will drive an influx of innovators and economic development, not to mention invigorate the southeast part of downtown.
“I think the reason it's played out well is because it really was this happy confluence of win on the business side, win on the higher ed side, and win on the civic side,” he says.
We also poked around his office. Here is what we found:
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Crystal Wise
Artist's renderings of Texas A&M's Tier 1 research campus in downtown are a point of emphasis in an adjacent conference room. In fact, Ahdieh admits to peeking outside his window to see the progress of the Law and Education Building.
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Crystal Wise
That’s the most important shovel Ahdieh has ever picked up. That’s the one he used as part of the ceremonial groundbreaking of Texas A&M’s Law and Education Building. At right: Ahdieh’s wife, whom he shares four children, is fluent in Mandarin and Japanese. “That’s ‘lawyer,’ basically, in Chinese.”
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While in Russia conducting research, Ahdieh was an eyewitness to history. In August of 1991, hardliners in of the Soviet Communist Party attempted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. These newspapers testify to his presence there. While there he also met a young Vladimir Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. “He was the most non-entity. It's funny, in that book, I interviewed taxi cab drivers [and many other people], whatever, and I talked with Putin, and he was such a non-nothing, that it didn't even occur to me that I should ask him some questions.”
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Crystal Wise
Ahdieh published one of the seminal treatments of the constitutional transformation of post-Soviet revolutionary Russia: Russia's Constitutional Revolution — Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy.
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Crystal Wise
Ahdieh acquired this fantastic relic of a typewriter as a youngster. He estimates likely around the age of 13. He was a flea market guy, always on the prowl for something cool to buy. “This was a typewriter I got,” he says. “One time I bought, I think like an $800 carpet. It's a Persian carpet … I'm Persian. I brought it home and my parents were, like, ‘What the hell?’ I was, like, ‘It seemed like a nice carpet.’ And they, of course, made me return the damn carpet.’ He laughs at the memory.
Sitting on top is a key to the city of Del Rio. “I was invited to come down to Del Rio to speak. And then they took me and said, ‘We're going to go meet the mayor.’ This guy is sitting in a little office in this little tiny building. And he said, ‘Wait a second, I have to do something.’ And he went away for 10 minutes and came back with the key to the city.”
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This gavel is a memento of Ahdieh’s tenure as a law clerk for Judge Jim Browning, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
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Ahdieh has spent a lot of time in China. During an event in Beijing, the host asked Ahdieh if he liked gold or silver? “I said, ‘What? I like both?’ He says silver is better. I don’t know what he’s talking about. He literally comes back six hours later and says, 'I want to present you with this.'” This silver pen.
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Before becoming a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Ahdieh worked in the U.S. Department of Justice. While there he worked on a $3 billion discrimination case, as well as the Nixon family’s claim to the 37th president’s papers and their value. He also was assigned a case on USDA regulations concerning the harvesting of prairie dogs. His colleagues had some fun with that one. “They bought me a prairie dog and then they made a book, which I don't have anymore. They made a fake law case book, ‘Ahdieh on Prairie Dogs.’”