A CAREER INTERRUPTED

Following his travels, Mundheim began what he expected to be a long career at the law firm Shearman & Sterling. But after just several months at the firm, he was called into service in Berlin with his Air Force National Gaurd Unit following the construction of the Berlin Wall.

“My job was writing numbers backwards on a glass backboard so the officers on the other side who controlled the aircraft could read them,” he says.

After being discharged in 1962, Mundheim was persuaded by various Harvard contacts in the Kennedy Administration to take on a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), conducting a special study of mutual funds.

But Mundheim would only be at the SEC for a year before receiving a phone call from the Dean of the Duke Law School asking him if he could be persuaded to try his hand at teaching.

To Mundheim’s surprise, the dean showed up at his office in Washington, DC at 9 a.m. the next morning to seal the deal, and the next thing he knew he was a visiting professor at Duke School of Law.

During his year at Duke, Mundheim discovered his passion for teaching, and decided to pursue it as a career. He found the perfect match for his interests at the University of Pennsylvania Law school—a school located in between the financial district of New York and the political center of Washington.

“I thought that would make it easy to be in touch with the government and people in financial practice without being so close that you would begin to get drawn in,” Mundheim says.

He joined the Penn faculty in January of 1965, but he did not stay long before returning to his roots. In 1968 Mundheim came back to HLS as a visiting professor where he was again reunited with Shapiro.

“It was great fun because you were now on a faculty with a substantial number of people who had taught you, and I had a very good friend who was a freshman college roommate who was a professor at Harvard Law School,” Mundheim recalls.

One of the contacts that Mundheim made while visiting Harvard was Fritz Kubler, who would ultimately relocate to the University of Konstanz in Germany. In 1973 Kubler called on Mundheim to aid the law school in it’s efforts to model it’s teaching faculty on those of American law schools. After a year in Germany and several more back at Penn, Mundheim moved to the UCLA School of Law for another visiting stint in 1977.

During his time there, Harold Williams, then the Dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, was appointed to be the chairperson of the SEC, and asked Mundheim to join him as a commissioner. Mundheim says he was denied the job because the SEC was looking for a woman to fill the position.

THE PUBLIC SERVANT

But just as the SEC job was falling through, Mundheim came across an even better opportunity—General Counsel to the U.S. Treasury Department.

The appearance of the second opportunity, he says, was “one of the kind of funny things that shows you that life has its own pattern.”