UC Riverside Makes Pitch for Law School

UC San Diego wanted to open a law school in the early 1980s, but it was shot down after a study showed there was no need for one.

The faculty at UC Irvine approved a law school a decade ago, but the idea has largely lain dormant. UC Santa Barbara won permission to build one in 1971, but has never pursued it.

Now UC Riverside is making a play for one, arguing that it’s the most suitable location for a long-sought public law school in Southern California.

Campus and civic leaders on Thursday shepherded a busload of UC regents through downtown Riverside to show off prime real estate set aside by the county law library for the proposed school.

But some members of the Board of Regents, which could decide the fate of the school as early as September, remain hesitant. They cite the findings of a new Rand Corp. study that California already produces enough, and perhaps too many, lawyers.

The $120,000 study, commissioned by UC officials, concludes that the number of lawyers “is likely to keep pace with or exceed the expected growth in demand between now and 2015, for the state as a whole and for each region in the state as well.”

The conclusion came as no surprise to Regent William Bagley, a San Francisco lawyer who skipped Thursday’s tour.

California has “lawyers who are driving taxis and pumping gas,” Bagley said. “We don’t need any more lawyers and we don’t need any more law schools.”

So far, such statements have not dissuaded law school backers. Speaking into the microphone on the “Bus Braveheart” like a veteran tour guide, state appellate Justice James D. Ward told the regents about the enormous outpouring of local support for the school, including a $5-million pledge from a developer to help build it.

“For a period of time, we were a backwater and felt that way, particularly in the legal arena,” Ward said as he showed off the city’s cluster of state and federal courthouses. The county law library had the foresight to snatch up an entire city block, he said, “to build a UC Riverside law school as the crown jewel of our legal center.”

UC Riverside Chancellor Raymond L. Orbach and his staff have come up with a long list of reasons why UC’s fastest-growing campus should be allowed to proceed with its law school plans.

Perhaps the most compelling argument is to correct a geographic imbalance in the location of the state’s law schools. Three of four public law schools are in Northern California--at UC Berkeley, UC Davis and Hastings in San Francisco--while only one, UCLA School of Law, is in Southern California, where 60% of the state’s population resides.

Moreover, Orbach and supporters said that Riverside and San Bernardino counties have far fewer lawyers than population centers closer to the coast. A UC law school, which they hope would earn the accreditation of the American Bar Assn., would be the only law school in the Inland Empire with such stature.

A fully accredited school would attract high-caliber lawyers to the area and give disadvantaged students in the region a chance at a top-flight legal education, they say.

“It’s a coming of age for the Inland Empire,” Orbach said. “Not to have a law school would be a missing link.”

But several regents said they need to do what’s best for the state, not just the Inland Empire.

“They haven’t made the case yet that we need another law school,” said John Davies, Board of Regents chairman and a San Diego attorney. “I’m not saying it can’t be made. It just hasn’t been made yet.”

Law school deans on other campuses worry that a new mouth to feed would starve them of money they need to hire the best possible faculty in a highly competitive market. Some worry that it also would further divide up the limited pool of top minority students who compete successfully for admission at UC’s law schools.

Regent Velma Montoya, an opponent of a new law school who believes the American legal system is “broken,” said it costs California taxpayers $26,300 a year to put a student through law school.

“I think we have better uses for taxpayer money,” she said. “UC Riverside should be focused on training more engineers, computer scientists and social workers, because those jobs are going begging.”

Riverside’s legal community has been pushing a law school for more than a decade. Orbach picked up the issue when he became chancellor in 1992, calling for both law and medical schools in his inaugural address to the campus, which now has 11,000 students and is scheduled to grow to 20,000 by 2010.

Leaders on other campuses have had similar ideas.

Richard C. Atkinson, when he was chancellor at UC San Diego in the early 1980s, sought to have the campus acquire a private law school in San Diego. The idea was rebuffed by his boss, the president of the nine-campus system. Now Atkinson holds the president’s job.

The governing body of UC Irvine’s faculty, known as the Academic Senate, approved a law school about a decade ago. But the idea never went any further during the 1990s while the Irvine campus struggled through a recession and scandals involving its medical school. Recently it has been revived by administrators drafting a short list of possible new schools to open this decade.

UC Santa Barbara was granted approval from the regents to build a law school 29 years ago. Yet given the environmentally sensitive habitat that constrains its growth, the campus has never built one.

Riverside’s proposal seems to have some political momentum--for now.

Assemblyman Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside) has been drumming up support in the Legislature. And S. Sue Johnson, a Riverside resident and unabashed booster of her hometown campus and the law school, is in line to become chairwoman of the Board of Regents this summer.

Johnson believes she could muster a sufficient number of regents to approve a law school, provided that it has the support of UC faculty.

Riverside’s Academic Senate gave its blessing for a law school last fall. The systemwide Academic Senate now is reviewing the proposal, as is the California Postsecondary Education Commission. Both are expected to make recommendations to Atkinson later this year. Then he may forward it to the regents for a vote.

“The Academic Senate is very important,” Johnson said. “If they come out against it, we are dead in the water.”