Whittier College Plans to Move Law School to County in Summer

Whittier College Law School is planning to leave its Los Angeles campus for an Orange County location this summer, a move that would make it the county’s first American Bar Assn.-approved law school, officials announced Monday.

The 650-student law school has outgrown its current 60,000-square-foot facility in Hancock Park and expects to welcome its freshman law class to a building twice that size in either Costa Mesa or Irvine this August, said John FitzRandolph, the law school’s dean.

Negotiations for a new building are expected to be completed by the end of March, officials said.

The arrival of an ABA-approved law school in the county would fill a void created almost two decades ago when Pepperdine University left for Malibu.

Orange County is one of the most populous areas in the country without an ABA-approved law school.

“We thought there was a real market for an ABA law school,” FitzRandolph said. “To have 2.5 million people in a county without one is just unheard of.”

ABA approval, which is based upon such factors as student-faculty ratios and the size of legal libraries, is considered one of the most prestigious classifications a law school can obtain.

There are about 180 ABA-approved law schools in the country.

Chapman University, which opened its law school last fall, is aggressively seeking ABA approval, which school officials hope to obtain as early as February 1997.

“Good luck to Whittier,” said Jeremy Miller, Chapman University’s law school dean. “There’s enough room in Orange County for both of us.”

However, FitzRandolph questioned whether Chapman University will be able to secure ABA approval so quickly.

“It took us eight years to get full ABA approval and I don’t think any school is going to get it in much less time that that,” FitzRandolph said. “It’s not automatic.”

Orange County’s only other law school, Western State University College of Law, failed in its bid for ABA accreditation in the mid-1980s.

Western, however, has state bar approval.

For more than five years the Whittier College Board of Trustees has been considering leaving Los Angeles, but it only granted approval for the move in May 1995.

Since then, officials have been searching primarily mid-coastal areas in Orange County for a suitable location.

The school’s relocation plans sparked anger Monday among some Whittier law students, who don’t want to commute to Orange County.

“I didn’t apply to an Orange County school, although I will be forced to graduate from one,” said one law student, who asked not to be identified. “This leaves us hogtied, and it’s really unfair.”

School officials, however, say they are minimizing any educational disruption by giving upper-level students until fall 1997 before they have to come to Orange County.