Chapman Law School Nearing Accreditation

After two rejections, the Chapman University School of Law on Tuesday took a major step toward national accreditation by receiving the blessing of a key panel of the American Bar Assn.

If the recommendation is upheld by ABA delegates meeting next month in Tennessee, an action that is usually a foregone conclusion, the law school would become the second in Orange County in the nation’s upper echelon. Whittier Law School, which moved to Costa Mesa last year, was the first.

The announcement touched off a prolonged celebration at the 2-year-old law school’s temporary campus in Anaheim. For 192 students, including 58 expected to be in the first graduating class in May, ABA accreditation means the ability to take the bar exam in any state in the country.

The law school’s dean, Parham Williams, who arrived here in June with a mandate to raise academic standards, delivered the news to students at a 3 p.m. meeting.

“There was a roar like you wouldn’t believe,” said George Willis, 29, a third-year student from Huntington Beach. “Just imagine seeing the winning touchdown being thrown in the last second of the game, and you stand up and spill your popcorn and scream at the TV. That’s what it was. A lot of high fives and hugs, and even some tears of joy.”

For Chapman, much is riding on the ABA decision. The university, headquartered in Orange, has raised $3.55 million to endow the law school and secured $3.25 million from the city of Orange to build a parking structure.

“No news could be more wonderful or significant to our university community,” Chapman President Jim Doti said in a prepared statement.

National accreditation also would mark a coming of age for Orange County’s legal community. The county is home to about 10,000 lawyers, making it one of the busiest legal centers in California after Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Now, with Chapman expected to win the ABA’s approval and Western State University College of Law in Fullerton also contending for the accreditation, county law firms may find more legal talent staying home, said Ed Connor, president of the Orange County Bar Assn.

“What this does,” Connor said, “is provide a more convenient outlet for students who graduate from our local universities. Now, instead of having to look at the options of possibly leaving the county, they can go to an ABA-accredited school here. That keeps the local talent here in our county.”

Chapman would join only about 180 law schools nationwide with ABA accreditation.

Chapman’s first petition was denied a year ago, and a subsequent appeal rebuffed, after the screening committee found that the law school’s academic standards were not rigorous enough.

The denial caused an uproar among students who had enrolled starting in 1995 with what they thought was a promise of imminent accreditation. The university offered refunds of portions of its $18,000 annual tuition to students who promised not to sue. At least 48 accepted, but 31 took their complaints to court.

An attorney for the university, Duke Wahlquist of Costa Mesa, said the future of those suits now was not immediately clear, but that Tuesday’s news would buttress the university’s defense.

An analysis prepared by the ABA committee that grilled university officials last week in Los Angeles declared that the law school is in “substantial compliance” with national academic standards and has “a reliable plan” to achieve full compliance within three years--good enough to warrant provisional accreditation.

Among the actions applauded by the ABA committee were an upgrade of the law school library, higher admissions standards for new students and stiffer grading curves for currently enrolled students.

The team also said that the school was “in experienced hands” and that it “was clearly impressed by the strengths of the new dean.”

George Argyros, chairman of Chapman’s board of trustees, said upgrading the law school was worth it.

“I’ll call it an investment,” Argyros said. “Sometimes you have to do what’s in the long-term best interest of the university. There has been a cost and a learning curve, but Chapman has responded progressively.”

Times correspondent Debra Cano contributed to this report.