But there is plenty to worry about.

The law school faculty, painstakingly recruited over the last decade, is increasingly ripe for poaching by other institutions - competitor Drexel University last year hired away one top faculty member.

And while there is no evidence yet that Philadelphia-area law firms are retrenching, the national job market for lawyers is softening and that could shrink options for this year's graduating class.

Then there is the pressure of following Dean Robert Reinstein, who built the law school's endowment from $4 million to nearly $60 million, and who transformed the school from a commuter campus to one with national and even international ambitions.

Setbacks in any one of those arenas could cause the law school's rankings to plummet.

Yet the 56-year-old Epps, who assumes control on July 1, appears unfazed.

She is contemplating changes to the curriculum for third-year law students that would shift it from a classic textbook approach to emphasize the real-life legal problems of lawyers.

One idea is to have groups of students collaborate on a legal issue, much as teams of lawyers tackle cases in everyday practice.

Should the regional economy turn downward and end the hiring binge at Philadelphia-area firms, Epps said she wanted career counselors to point out the ample opportunities in smaller Pennsylvania cities and in South Jersey.

"There is this great story of a student who came to Temple a few years ago and his goal was to work in a big Center City firm," Epps said. "He didn't get the job in the big firm and ended up getting a job in Atlantic City. He said to us later, 'What was I thinking? I get to live at the Shore, go to work, make a good living. Why would I want to live in Philadelphia?' "

What Epps thinks about legal education and career development is important not only in Philadelphia legal circles, but also outside the city. Temple is the largest feeder school for big area law firms, and it increasingly recruits students from across the country.

Epps, a Yale-trained lawyer, takes over after joining the Temple faculty in 1985 and serving as a teacher and administrator.

Before joining the university, she had an industrial-strength career as a trial lawyer, trying scores of cases as a city prosecutor in Los Angeles and then as a criminal prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia.

She is a widely respected expert on criminal procedure and evidence. Yet, she said, her early career focus as a trial lawyer does not mean she will devote inordinate attention to Temple's intensive program for training trial lawyers and that other programs will suffer as a result.

She said the trial-lawyer program was so well-established it did not need extra help. But she does want to enhance Temple law's programs in Beijing, Tokyo and Rome, and cooperative arrangements with other law schools abroad.

Epps said the law school also must strive to preserve what she described as its unique admissions focus.

She said it emphasized personal background, leadership skills, and other subjective criteria that contribute to the overall caliber of students, even as the law school seeks continued improvements in standardized test scores and grade-point averages.

Ideally, she said, lawyers are agents of social change, and she strives to show students they can shape the world around them for the better. That is a controversial idea among conservative jurists and legal scholars who bridle at the notion of lawyers and judges making policies and laws they say Congress and state legislatures should draft.

Epps said her point was not that young lawyers should join a social crusade, but rather that the law was complex and evolving, and that an activist approach was one respected tradition.

"I simply want to inspire my students to consider that as a possibility," Epps said. "Some of my students will turn out to be the next generation of Antonin Scalias [the conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice]. So I am not expecting that everyone needs to be an agent of social change, especially to the extent that you might think of that as a liberal agenda. What I want my students to appreciate is that the law is fluid and very changing."

About JoAnne A. Epps

Personal: Married, husband's name is L. Harrison Jay, lives in Shamong, N.J.

Education: Graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., 1973, and of Yale Law School, 1976.

Experience: Deputy city attorney for the City of Los Angeles, 1976 to 1980; assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia 1980

to 1985; teacher and administrator at Temple University Law School, 1985 to present.