Campbell Law 50th Anniversary Alumni Spotlight: Jon Powell ‘98

Clinical Professor Jon Powell ‘98 is the director of Campbell Law School’s Restorative Justice Clinic,  the law school’s oldest pro bono clinic. Originally from Garner, North Carolina, he earned his bachelor’s degree in communications from N.C. State University (NCSU). He was inducted into the Wake County Public School System Hall of Fame in 2025 in recognition of his community service. 

Current Role: Clinical Professor at Campbell Law School

Why Campbell Law? 

Powell came to Campbell Law in a roundabout way. For 16 years, he worked for Carolina Power and Light Co. “I got my undergraduate degree at N.C. State in communication the last 10 of those years, going to school at night and working full-time during the day. And I just decided there was something else out there for me. I wanted to extend my education, and because of one of my professors at state talking saying some of his students had actually gone to law school, I got it in my mind and I couldn’t get rid of it.” He started looking around, he says. Campbell was a practical choice. “I had family down there; we had a place to live. It was a Christian-based school,and  I’m a spiritual person, so those things just lined up and it made a lot of sense for me to go to Campbell.”

On practice

Powell would say he practices criminal law, but with a caveat. “What I do is a full-time job, and my passion is directing the Restorative Justice Clinic. As a criminal defense attorney working in the system, I realized that there was a lot of pain in that system. Nobody really wants to be involved in the criminal legal system, and punishment is not enough to rectify all the things that you see coming into that system. I just thought that there’s got to be something else out there that can be better for people.”

After he was introduced to restorative justice, “I thought, I think this is the answer to my frustration.”

A new law professor, Tony Baker, introduced him to the practice. “This is after I’d been out for about three or four years, I think, and he and I attended a seminar that was put on by Campbell, and he was telling me about it, and he wanted a clinic at the law school, which we did not have and had never had. And I wanted something to serve the folks that I was working with in the criminal legal system.”

They pursued those desires, and eventually introduced the idea of the clinic to then law school Dean Willis Whichard. He liked the idea, Powell said, and suggested they talk to Judge Ed McCormick, the chief judge in Campbell’s jurisdiction, the 11th Judicial District. “He liked the idea. And so those two men put together a task force to figure out how to do it.”

Powell and Baker became co-directors of the Clinic, which they served for two years. Powell became the full-time director in 2005. “Nobody ever dreamed that I’d be called professor at Campbell Law School. I mean, I was lucky to graduate, to tell you the truth. A lot of hard work and a lot of low grades, but I did graduate, I did pass the bar on the first try. I started practicing law, and it was out of this frustration, which I described, that we developed the clinic.”

A lesson that stuck

“I feel like all of our students get a great legal education, and I’m very grateful for that. So, Campbell taught me the value of working hard in the legal profession. They also taught me to be ethical in everything that I did. They emphasize that you really need to be ethical in your professional dealings in the profession of law … and I have learned that is true. Being in the courts and dealing with judges and prosecutors and lawyers and clients, they need to know that they can count on what you say, because truth is of ultimate importance in our judicial system, and we hear horror stories too often where that is not the case. But, I think they taught me to work hard and be ethical so people could count on my word.”

People who shaped you 

Powell says he can answer that question by naming a fellow student with whom he became great friends — Alice Masaryk. “We started at the same time. She was married, I was married. Married folks kind of flocked together in the law school community, and we became very good friends with her and her husband.”

Masaryk, Powell says, enrolled in law school mostly because she found she had multiple sclerosis. At the time she was working as a nurse, a physically demanding job. “She needed to do something where she could be a little more quiet, instead of at a desk and that sort of thing. So she went to law school. She was just a fabulous person.” Masaryk’s MS progressed to the point, in her second year, that she had to take a semester off. “We were great friends. You could often see us walking across campus. She was kind of hanging on my arm to help her get along her way. She graduated a semester late, got a job practicing law and using her nursing expertise and her legal expertise in doing that work. Unfortunately, she died way too young. And that was a heartbreaking thing. But Alice was a great example for me of endurance and resilience and sticking in there even when the odds were impossible. And for her, the odds were impossible, but she worked hard until the end.”

Regarding professors, Powell says, there’s a list.  Alan Button was his torts professor. “He was a great professor, one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. It was after our first semester and grades had come out, and we’re into the second semester. He knew that we all had received our grades, and he knew that some of them were good, and some of them weren’t so good. Before he started class that day, he said, ‘I just want to say this to you: You should not value yourself and judge yourself on your grades, whether they were better than you thought or whether they were worse than you thought.’”

Powell’s grades were worse than he had hoped for. “So, that was a very important thing for me to hear from a man that I admired greatly. I mean, I knew he knew what he was talking about. And so that helped me quite a bit, and I know for everybody that’s involved.”

Law school is a different animal, Powell says. “For those of us that didn’t do what we had hoped that we would do, that was an important thing for me to hear.”

Powell also named Professor Tom Anderson. “I was the very first student in my class, on day one, on hour one, to be stood up, and that was Tom Anderson, and it was so funny,” Powell says. “He was looking at his roll, and we were all sitting there, quiet, and he looked up and said, ‘Powell, Jon Powell. … I thought he had some kind of clerical error, so I raised my hand. I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and he looked at me. He said, ‘Stand up, Mr. Powell.’ I thought, ‘Oh, boy, here we go.’ So, here we went, and I wasn’t the only one that was stood up that day. But I was stood up for the majority of the time, and it was hard, and he taught me a lot in that hour. I thought I knew how to prepare, but I didn’t know how to prepare. But after that hour with him, I was much better prepared to do law school.”

In fact, Powell admires many professors, some of whom are now friends and colleagues. “Greg Wallace is one of those, Dick Bowser is one of those. Stanley McQuaid retired some years ago and passed away some years ago, he’s one of those. Margaret Currin, who has retired, and I don’t see her as much, but she did a very important thing. She taught administrative law, which back in the day was a required course. I failed her exam. That’s the only exam I failed, but I did fail her exam.”

Yet she didn’t make Powell retake the course, which she could have done. “She let me retake the exam, but I didn’t just retake the exam. She worked with me during that semester on practice exams and grading them and giving me feedback, and I really feel like she taught me, kind of late in my career, the proper way to take a law school exam. Because of that, I give her a lot of credit for me passing the bar on the first time out, too. I think it was a tremendous help.”

Advice to current students

Powell’s advice might come a bit too late for a current law student, he says.  “When I was considering going to law school, there was a lawyer that had been to Campbell, and he learned what I was doing, and what I was doing was giving up a great job and moving my family out of a beautiful home to go to law school. He said, ‘Jon, don’t do this as an experiment. It’s too demanding to do it as an experiment.’ This is no joke. If I could talk to people before they come to law school, I think I would say the same thing. Law school is no joke. Nobody can tell you about it and help you understand what it’s really like.”

Work as hard as you can, he would also tell students. “I went a little bit against the grain of the advice that I was given as a first-year student, which was — ‘Don’t do anything else but law school. Drop everything else that you’re doing.’ I tried to adhere to that, and I did the first semester, and I realized that my spirit was actually dying. I mean, I’m the kind of person, I need to be working in the community. I need to be doing something that is fulfilling for me. Law school did not sit well in my soul. It just drained me, and so I needed things that I could do in the community.”

He had worked as an adult Sunday school teacher, and he returned to that during his second semester. “We found a great church in Buies Creek. We were very happy there. We had been attending there, but I had not been teaching. So I went back to that, and I think in a lot of ways that saved me, I really do. I don’t know if I’d have made it through law school if I had adhered to that original advice to drop everything else. I do tell students now, ‘Don’t quit everything. You need something that’s feeding your soul, and so continue to do those things that you love. Law school is extremely demanding, and you’ve got to devote more time to that than anything else. But those things that feed your soul, don’t quit doing those things.’”

The next 50 years

Powell thinks back to law school, during a time when experiential learning barely played a role. “We were really good at our trial advocacy program, teaching people to be courtroom attorneys, and I really appreciate that. I did better at that than anything else that I did because I just love to be in front of people and talking to people, picking juries and all that sort of thing. I really enjoy that in my practice, as well. And that was our hallmark, and in some ways it still is. But one of our hallmarks now is experiential legal education, and I appreciate that so much. I’m a clinical professor, so I couldn’t be a doctrinal professor. I couldn’t just stand at the podium and do the Socratic method and that sort of thing, but I can do the experiential (learning), and I’m glad that we have the opportunity. We also are still extremely academically rigorous, and I think that’s extremely important. I hope we will continue those two aspects of what we do now so well.”

Powell says Leonard is remarkable in the ways he helps bring so many great experiences to students — not only creating the relationships that make those things possible, but also securing funding to do them. “I asked Dean Leonard not long ago, ‘You’ve seen the movie ‘Men in Black?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, you’re watching the movie and you see all these remarkable human beings, only to find out that they’re not human beings at all; they’re aliens. That’s who you are. I know you’re an alien because no human being can do all that he does.’”

Sidebar

What are your reading/listening to/watching

My wife and I are watching the Apple TV series, “Shrinking.”

Most adventurous thing 

“Years ago, before my children were born, which was over 35 years ago, I jumped out of an airplane.” It’s something, Powell says, he always wanted to do. “We went to a hot air balloon festival in Fuquay-Varina one time, and we watched the hot air balloons take off, and that was wonderful. But then there was a skydiving group … and you could pay money and go up with them, get a little bit of testing, a little bit of training on the ground. Go up and do what they call a tandem dive, where you’re attached to an experienced skydiver, and he’s actually on your back, and the parachute is on him.” That’s what Powell did. He jumped at 10,000 feet. “It was amazing,” he says. “People ask me if I’d do it again, but I don’t think so. I got it out of my system … I was a whole lot younger then.”

Powell’s second adventurous thing came more recently. Campbell participates in a N.C Special Olympics fundraiser every year, in which people rappel down a building. “I rapelled down the Wells Fargo building near the law school, about 20 stories up, and that was amazing.”

Favorite Raleigh spot 

“My students would say the Flying Saucer is one of them, because that’s such an easy place to get to. I like that place. That’s for lunch. For breakfast, it’s the restaurant at the State Farmers Market.”

Proudest moment

“My kids, of course. I’ve got three adult children. We’re together all the time. I love being with them, and I don’t know if I would rank grandchildren above children, or not. They sure are great. I’ve got four grandchildren; No. 5 is going to be here in October, and so just being with my kids and my grandkids is hard to beat.”