Whittier College Facility Moving From L.A. to Orange County

The future Los Angeles will include one less training school for new lawyers. Whittier College Law School is planning to leave its Beverly Boulevard campus this summer for an Orange County location.

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

Whittier would be the first law school in Orange County to be accredited by the American Bar Assn. “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 on 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 nation.

The Whittier College Board of Trustees has been considering leaving Los Angeles for more than five years but granted approval for the move only last May. Since then, officials have been searching for a suitable location.

The school’s relocation plans sparked some anger among current 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 will minimize any disruption by giving upper-level students until fall 1997 before they have to go to Orange County.

The move would leave Los Angeles with five ABA-approved law schools: at UCLA, USC and Pepperdine, and Loyola Law School and Southwestern University School of Law near downtown.