Martin H. Brinkley ’92 (JD), Kenan Distinguished Professor and former dean of Carolina Law, has been named this year’s recipient of the Carolina Alumni Faculty Service Award. Established in 1990, the award honors University faculty who have performed outstanding service for UNC or the alumni association. The following profile, written and produced by Carolina Alumni, captures the career and character of a dean who spent a decade making this law school his own.

As the first UNC law school dean without a background in academia, Martin Brinkley ’92 (JD) entered the position a decade ago to the stage whispers of some skeptics wondering, “Who is this guy?” Within a year, he’d won all of them over.

“This guy” wore dapper three-piece suits, a bow tie and pocket watch. He also donned an apron and opened his kitchen to host “Biscuits With Brinkley,” a fundraiser in which he taught students who bid on the opportunity how to make his grandmother’s recipe for buttermilk biscuits.

A former president of the N.C. Bar Association and corporate lawyer, Brinkley brought 22 years of private practice experience to the deanship. As he settled into the dean’s office, he sought the expertise of his new law school colleagues to learn how to negotiate the bureaucracy of a big public institution. He hired good people then got out of their way, trusting them do their jobs. In his welcome address to first-years, he invited them to drop by his office to chat, and many of them did.

Brinkley taught classes and took classes at the law school. He and his students shared the stress of studying for a final or meeting deadlines for papers. Throughout his deanship, Brinkley kept up a teaching schedule. He started with an upper-level seminar, The Lifecycle of an Mergers and Acquisitions Deal, something he knew well from his practice. Then he added a legal history class, which he co-taught with a longtime faculty member. As he hit his stride teaching, he taught required courses of 1L Property and Business Associations. By the time students crossed the graduation stage, he’d taught two-thirds of them.

Law is a relationship profession. Talking and interacting are how lawyers teach it, learn it and practice it. Brinkley devoted time and effort into cultivating relationships, whether mentoring young lawyers at his firm or helping students see their future beyond the success they’d achieved in three- or four-year increments. He invited students, three at a time, to lunch after class so he could get to know them and they could meet the person behind the title. When two law students were sworn in and commissioned to the Air Force via Zoom during COVID, he joined the call and played the national anthem on his oboe.

Brinkley came from a musical family and never lost his love of playing the piano and oboe. His midlife crisis moment showed itself not by purchasing a red convertible but by acquiring a Bosendorfer grand piano that he plays daily. He has a few different oboes, and he makes the reeds himself. In his 50s, he polished his performance by taking lessons from the former principal oboist for the New York Philharmonic, a Lenoir native who’d retired to Chapel Hill. Brinkley sometimes plays the oboe to his law students to lower the stress, and he provides pro bono legal services to the International Double Reed Society.

When the school and the legal profession faced challenges from the pandemic, politics and other problems, Brinkley held open forums, community conversations where he stood before a building full of lawyers and lawyers-to-be and sought their input on what was going right and what needed to change and how. His passion and commitment to the success of the school and everyone in it came through. He fiercely defended the academic freedom of the faculty. Though the law school may not have the resources of a private school, it does have exceptional commitment from the Carolina Law community. One colleague summed it up: “We’re running on love.”

Brinkley extends that love to the rest of North Carolina. A significant portion of the state has ties to the military, through current or former active-duty members or as civilian employees or military families. Yet when Brinkley accepted the deanship, Carolina Law had few efforts devoted to military and veterans law. That changed a few years later when he hired an alumnus, newly retired from a career as an Army JAG, to establish and run a pro bono clinic that makes UNC Law an incubator for attorneys to spread out to the rest of the state to help veterans.

Brinkley has piled up a number of accomplishments as the longest-serving dean in Carolina Law’s history: a dramatic rise in its U.S. News & World Report ranking; student success measured in nearly 100 percent employment after graduation and passing the bar exam on the first attempt; a capital campaign that raised $78.7 million, more than twice the amount raised in any prior campaign. He’s been inducted into the North Caroliniana Society and is a master of the bench in the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, London, and he makes fig preserves from fruit he picks from his own trees.

Since stepping down as dean last year, Brinkley has remained at the law school to teach full time as a Kenan Distinguished Professor, the only one without a doctorate. But he’ll lose that distinction soon. Brinkley applied to UNC’s doctoral program in classics and sweated out waiting for his acceptance letter. Come fall, while teaching a full load of courses at the law school, he’ll study classics as a full-time doctoral candidate. At that rate, bemoaned his oboe teacher, “he’ll be 60 before he auditions for the New York Philharmonic.”