A new law school opening at UC Irvine will offer three years of free tuition to the incoming class of winter 2009. Tuition for students accepted in subsequent years will be at a standard rate.
The UC Irvine School of Law, California’s first public law school to open in over 40 years, expects to enroll about 60 students in the founding class. Funding for the initiative will require roughly $6 million and come entirely from private donations.
According to Director of Communication and Public Affairs Rex Bossert, the university is about one-third along in the path to acquiring the necessary funds.
‘We’re substantially far along in that process,’ Bossert said. ‘I’m fairly confident we’re reaching that amount.’
The university has received an additional $24 million in private donations for student scholarships and endowed faculty positions.
The university hopes that incentives such as the promise of free tuition, a curriculum focused on public interest, a prestigious faculty and a 3-to-1 student-faculty ratio will attract top law students from across the nation.
Founder Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who credits the civil-rights lawyers of the 1950s and ’60s as his legal inspiration, says his intention is to have the school recognized as one of the top 20 law schools in the country from the first time it is ranked, an effort he says will begin the day the school opens its doors.
‘Our goal is to be the best in the country at training lawyers to practice at the highest levels of the legal profession,’ Chemerinsky said in a statement.
Since the Standards and Rules of Procedure for the Approval of Law Schools by the American Bar Association stipulates that a law school cannot be considered for accreditation until its second year of operation, the school must wait until its second year to apply for accreditation.
However, according to Bossert, provisional accreditation during the school’s second year of operation will allow the students to take the bar exam in any state. Full accreditation is allowed after the school has been operating under ABA standards for two years. Achieving full accreditation is a three- to five-year process.
‘Provisional accreditation means essentially the same as accreditation ‘mdash; they could take the bar exam in any state,’ Bossert said. ‘We’ll do everything we can to get there. Our ABA consultant is telling us that we’re in excellent shape to get provisional accreditation at the earliest possible time. I can’t imagine the UC [system] having an unaccredited law school.’
Founding faculty member Catherine Fisk stressed the importance of innovation and collaboration in building a school from the ground up.
‘Our students will find our curriculum distinctly different,’ Fisk said. ‘We expect our school is going to involve more collaboration between students and faculty, since we’ll be creating all the institutions from scratch.’
Fisk added that the school’s curriculum will include variations on conventional methods of teaching law. ‘We are very excited about the prospects for creating a top-20 law school here at UC Irvine,’ Fisk said. ‘We are going to have an innovative curriculum that covers all the essential knowledge and skills, but that does so in a way more suited to modern legal practice than at most law schools, especially in their first year.’
Although standard tuition has not yet been determined, officials expect it to be similar to the tuition rates at the other UC laws schools at Davis, Los Angeles, Hastings and Berkeley.
According to the Internet Legal Research Group, tuition for all four UC law schools falls roughly between $35,000 and $38,000 annually.
Readers can contact Yelena Akopian at [email protected].