Panel’s OK Means UCI Law School Plan Will Pass Its 1st Test

A seven-member faculty committee will recommend as early as this week that UC Irvine become the fifth University of California campus with a law school.

William Sirignano, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCI and chair of the Law School Work Group, said that if the school gets final approval, recruiting for the dean would begin in a year and the first class would be in 2004.

But a new law school in Orange County is far from a cinch. It must be approved by UCI’s faculty, representatives of the UC system’s faculty, the UC president and the Board of Regents.

And UCI is not alone among the UC campuses wanting a law school. Just 44 miles away, UC Riverside is also making a play for the first UC law school since 1966, when classes began at UC Davis. In April, UC Riverside officials and civic leaders gave a busload of regents a tour of downtown Riverside to show off the land the county law library has set aside for the proposed law school. In addition, Henry W. Coil Jr., president of a construction company, has pledged $5 million to the school.

Supporters of law schools in Orange and Riverside counties make many of the same arguments, saying there is only one public law school south of San Francisco, UCLA, while two-thirds of the state’s population live in Southern California. The UC system charges about $11,000 a year for tuition, compared with $25,000 at such top private schools as Stanford and USC, said UCLA Law School Dean Jonathan Barat.

A UCI law school would be part of the ambitious expansion the school has planned for the next decade, increasing its size from 19,000 students to 30,000. Faculty committees also are studying the possibility of schools in pharmaceutical sciences, design and public health, although the law school is furthest along.

UCI Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone said he is waiting for the working group proposal to be evaluated around campus before he takes a stand. “We’re trying to figure out, A, do the critical people think it’s a good idea and, B, if it’s feasible,” he said. “But there is a lot of enthusiasm.”

He said a few legislators from around the state, most of them from Southern California, have called him to express support. He declined to name them.

*

UC campuses in Southern California have been pushing for a law school for nearly 30 years, but none has opened since UCLA in 1949. The regents gave UC Santa Barbara permission to build a law school in 1971, but that proposal never went forward. UCI’s faculty endorsed a law school in 1990, and the proposal went far enough that heiress Joan Irvine Smith said she planned to endow a $1-million chair. But when the recession stopped the growth of the UC system, the idea for the law school fell by the wayside.

Besides competing with Riverside, a UCI law school also would have to overcome a Rand Corp. report commissioned by UC officials that concluded this year that the number of lawyers in the state is expected to at least keep pace with population growth and perhaps exceed it.

While that may be true, the top law schools are not planning to grow, Sirignano said. “If you believe we’d better increase the number of lawyers trained in the top-tier schools in California, there’s a crying need for a UC-type law school,” he said. “That’s what our legal consultants are telling us.

Most important, UCI officials will have to convince the regents of the need for a law school. Regent Velma Montoya has already said she opposes any new law schools, believing the legal system is “broken.”

*

Regent William Bagley, a San Francisco lawyer, said he was of two minds. On the one hand, he said, there are too many lawyers.

“But UC isn’t going to stop the proliferation,” he said.

“If you’re going to have more lawyers, you ought to have good lawyers, so they should have a law school in Southern California.”

Orange County already has three law schools accredited by the American Bar Assn.: Chapman University, Whittier College and Western State University College of Law.

But a law school at UCI would be the only one at a research university and probably the most rigorous academically. It would be expected to draw students from across the state. The other UC law schools, especially UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall and UCLA, are among the most exclusive in the country. Only about 19% of those who applied for UCLA’s first-year class of 900 were admitted this year.

“We certainly want something that is ranked nationally near the top within a decade,” Sirignano said.

Since his committee started working in June, its members have talked to federal and state judges, lawyers, law school deans and officials with accrediting agencies, he said.

The report will suggest areas the law school could specialize in that fit its Orange County location, such as intellectual property rights, a burgeoning field with the boom in high-tech; public-interest law, because of the county’s changing demographics; and international law, Sirignano said.

Sirignano would not say how much a law school would cost. “At this point we think it’s affordable,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we think it’s cheap.”