Law Schools Fulfill Longtime Dream in Orange County

For years, prominent members of Orange County’s legal community have been making a case for an American Bar Assn.-approved law school, arguing that if you build it, students will come.

The calls went unheeded--until now.

Orange County is suddenly one of the hottest markets for schools hoping to churn out more young lawyers, even though applications to law schools nationwide fell for the fifth straight year in 1995.

Chapman University in Orange is educating its first law school class. Whittier College plans to close its Hancock Park campus and relocate to Costa Mesa or Irvine in August.

To meet this influx of competition--and in hopes of securing the same prestigious ABA endorsement that Whittier is bringing to the mix--Western State University School of Law recently decided to combine its long-established Irvine and Fullerton campuses into a single law school.

Added to all this activity are revived calls for establishing what would be a fourth Orange County law school--this one at UC Irvine.

“If all the present plans come about, we would have finally succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” said 4th District Court of Appeal Justice William F. Rylaarsdam, one of the most vocal advocates of having an ABA-approved law school in Orange County. “It can only help the quality of the profession.”

Andrew J. Guilford, a Newport Beach lawyer who chairs the UC Irvine Law School Founders Committee, a group of community leaders and professors, said the university needs to act soon to set up its own program.

“I’m concerned that UCI is losing its opportunity to be the principal law school here,” said Guilford, a past president of the Orange County Bar Assn. “I’m particularly interested that a law school be established at UCI before the unique opportunity passes it by.”

People such as Guilford and Rylaarsdam have argued that the decision to locate an ABA-approved school in Orange County is a no-brainer. With 2.5 million people, the county is the most populous area in the country without one.

In addition to the county’s busy Municipal and Superior courts, a new 10-story federal courthouse named for Ronald Reagan will open in Santa Ana in 1997. The fact that the county is also home to high-tech industries and about 70,000 businesses almost guarantees full employment for legions of lawyers.

Yet Orange County has been without an ABA-approved law school since Pepperdine University School of Law moved to Malibu almost two decades ago.

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Since then, aspiring lawyers in Orange County have had to rely on Western State, a private, for-profit school that has educated nearly one in every five lawyers practicing in the county. But Western State lacks ABA accreditation, meaning its graduates are generally barred from becoming licensed--and practicing--in other states.

To meet ABA standards, law schools are required, among other things, to keep student-faculty ratios to less than 25 to 1, limit the hours faculty members teach, keep a certain number of books on library shelves, and limit the number of hours students can work at outside jobs.

No for-profit law school is among the 180 ABA-approved programs in the United States.

After Western State lost a bid for ABA approval in 1987, several lawyers and judges launched efforts to establish an ABA-accredited school.

Rylaarsdam attempted to lure his alma mater, Loyola Law School, to Orange County, but officials there balked at the suggestion.

UC Irvine faculty voted overwhelmingly in 1990 to establish a fifth UC system law school in Irvine, but university leaders never acted on the proposal.

Orange County got word of its long-awaited ABA-approved law school when Whittier College announced a month ago that it was closing its cramped Hancock Park facility to move across the Los Angeles County line.

The 650-student law school, said Dean John FitzRandolph, expects to welcome its 1996 entering class to a building twice the size of its former Hancock Park headquarters. The move, however, angered Whittier’s current law students, who will be forced to commute to Orange County in 1997.

“By moving to Orange County, we’re meeting a need for an ABA-school and solving our growth problems,” FitzRandolph said.

FitzRandolph said Whittier has a distinct advantage over its competitors because it has ABA approval.

About Chapman’s plans to secure ABA approval by 1997, FitzRandolph said: “It’s a long road for them. It took us eight years to get it. I can’t see how they’ll do it in two.”

Even though some law school educators disagree, Chapman Law School Dean Jeremy Miller insists that his school is on track for winning ABA approval as early as February 1997--a remarkable feat considering the first classes opened in a nondescript Anaheim office building last fall.

Miller’s confidence is probably due in no small part to the fact that the Orange-based university has the backing of several wealthy alumni, including millionaire developer George Argyros.

Miller said a few other schools--Brigham Young University and UC Davis--received ABA approval in similar time frames.

Chapman will conduct its own inspection this month to ready the school for upcoming visits by ABA officials. With a student faculty ratio of 19-to-1, well below ABA standards, Miller says he is confident of success.

“We are starting to look more ABA than the ABA,” Miller said.

Chapman officials said they don’t feel threatened by other local law schools.

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“Chapman will be the best law school in Orange County,” said Miller. “Yale Law School is our model--an academic, idealistic, private institution. That type of law school won’t impinge on a market that serves Western [and Whittier].”

The flurry of activity involving ABA approval has sent Western State scrambling. Whittier’s announcement of its decision to relocate to Orange County immediately prompted officials at Western State University’s College of Law to counter the new competitive threat. Western State officials reasoned that to survive in Orange County, they would have to secure ABA approval as soon as possible.

“We need the ABA approval,” said Western State President Jack Monks. “If we can’t get it, then our graduates would be getting something less and would become second-class citizens in [the legal community in] Orange County.”

Western State has already hired consultants to advise the school how to succeed this time.

To qualify for approval, officials will have to expand or build a new law library at their main Fullerton campus. Also, the school probably will have to hire more full-time faculty to reduce its student-to-teacher ratio.

Ronald Talmo, a law professor at Western State, said that having three law schools will benefit the community, especially since out-of-state students will come to study in the area.

“They are going to bring in new, different ideas,” Talmo said. “We don’t want to inbreed, frankly.”

Advocates of a law school at UC Irvine say the university should revive its own plans.

UC Irvine professor Joe DiMento, a member of a committee that voted in 1990 to establish a law school, said efforts to found a local school are stalled. Years of lean state budgets more than any other factor have placed the proposal on the University of California’s back burner, he said.

But DiMento added that three ABA-approved law schools in Orange County probably would not discourage UC officials from opening a law school at the Irvine campus.

“There’s a great demand for UC-educated lawyers,” said DiMento, who teaches urban planning and criminology. “My view is that a law school at UCI can and should happen.”

Guilford, the former bar association president, said the university must not abandon plans for a law school.

“Good law schools make good lawyers,” Guilford said. “Since we need more good lawyers, we need more good law schools.”