Charles W. Wolfram, the Charles Frank Reavis Sr. Professor of Law at the Cornell University Law School, has been named interim dean of the Law School effective Aug. 1. Wolfram will serve in that capacity through June 30, 1999. The appointment was announced by Provost Don M. Randel.

Wolfram succeeds Russell K. Osgood, who will become president of Grinnell College. Osgood has served as dean of the Law School since 1988.

Wolfram, one of the nation's leading scholars of legal ethics, has been quoted widely in the news media on a variety of issues pertaining to legal ethics, most recently on the broad powers of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

He has written extensively on matters pertaining to legal ethics, including a leading textbook on the subject, Modern Legal Ethics (West Publishing Co., 1968). He has published in dozens of magazines and journals, including Trial Magazine, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, the Cornell Law Review and the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. He also is one of the authors of the American Law Institute's "Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers," a proposed reformulation of state law outlining lawyer behavior.

Wolfram joined the Cornell Law School as a visiting professor in 1981 and served as associate dean for academic affairs from 1986 to 1990. Prior to coming to Cornell, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Wolfram holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame (1959) and an LL.B. from the University of Texas Law School (1962).