UC Berkeley School of Law
The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law is the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. The school was commonly referred to as "Boalt Hall" for many years, although it was never the official name. This came from its initial building, the Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, named for John Henry Boalt. This name was transferred to an entirely new law school building in 1951 but was removed in 2020.
Image:Berkeley - panoramio.jpg|thumb|The Law Building and the South Pavilion, which was completed in 2011.In 2019, 98 percent of graduates obtained full-time employment within nine months, with a median salary of $190,000. Of all the law schools in California, Berkeley had the highest bar passage rates in 2021 and 2022. The school offers J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and Ph.D. degrees, and enrolls approximately 320 to 330 J.D. students in each entering class, annually, with each class being further broken down into smaller groups that take courses together.
Berkeley Law alumni include notable federal judges, politicians, Fortune 500 executives, noted legal academics and civil rights experts. Prominent alumni include Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk, U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese, U.S. secretary of the treasury and Chair of the Federal Reserve G. William Miller, President of the International Court of Justice Joan Donoghue, Mayor of San Francisco Ed Lee, Dallas Mavericks CEO Terdema Ussery, and Nuremberg Trials prosecutor Whitney Robson Harris.
History
Department of Jurisprudence
The school that is today known as Berkeley Law originated in 1894 as the Department of Jurisprudence of the University of California. On August 17, 1894, the Regents of the University of California approved a resolution for transmission to President Martin Kellogg which directed that the "branch of study" already under the supervision of Professor William Carey Jones was to be separated from the Department of History and Political Science "and formed into a new department embracing: Constitutional Law of the United States, International Law, Roman Law, and Jurisprudence". This resolution had emerged from a subcommittee of the Board of Regents whose members were all lawyers.Jones personally taught all the new department's courses for the first three years. According to Jones, the inspiration for the department came from his experience in 1882 teaching a course in Roman law to Berkeley seniors. Jones envisioned that the new department would be less vocational and more academic in comparison to the existing Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Initially, the department was merely intended to broaden Berkeley undergraduates' academic knowledge of the law. Students who wished to learn how to actually practice law were referred to Hastings, where coursework already completed at Berkeley could count towards earning Hastings law degrees.
In 1901, the number of faculty was increased to six by the hiring of one lecturer and two instructors, which enabled the department to offer courses adding up to two years of instruction. In 1902, the addition of four more lecturers enabled the department to provide a complete three-year law program and the referrals to Hastings were discontinued. On June 26, 1902, newspapers in San Francisco and Oakland reported that there was now a "complete law school" at Berkeley, whose graduates would be eligible to immediately apply for admission to the California bar without having to take additional courses at Hastings. The department awarded its first law degrees in 1903 to three men, one of whom was journalist and labor activist Motoyuki Negoro. In 1906, Emmy Marcuse was the first woman to earn a law degree from the department.
These fortuitous developments at Berkeley were also a great catastrophe for Hastings. Both law schools had started with one full-time law professor aided by part-time instructors who were practicing lawyers, but only Berkeley made the rapid transition to hiring enough full-time lecturers and professors to teach the majority of its courses and then tightened up its requirements for student admissions and faculty hiring. Berkeley quickly eclipsed Hastings and pushed the older law school into a severe decline which lasted over four decades.
The law that affiliated Hastings with UC states: "The college is affiliated with the University of California, and is the law department thereof." According to UCLA political science professor J.A.C. Grant, the law school at Berkeley was euphemistically labeled a department of jurisprudence for decades because it was believed UC could have only one "law department."
On January 17, 1911, the department began holding classes in the newly constructed Boalt Memorial Hall of Law at the center of the main UC Berkeley campus, and it was formally dedicated on April 28, 1911. This building was completed in 1911 with funds partially obtained from a donation of San Francisco land made by Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt in memory of her late husband, John Henry Boalt, an attorney who had resided in Oakland, California until his death in 1901.
School of Jurisprudence
As the Department of Jurisprudence at Berkeley began to rise in prestige, and Hastings began to fall, the students, faculty, and alumni of the department became quite vocal about turning the department into a real law school. The department was already distinguished enough by August 1912 to obtain admission to the Association of American Law Schools, even though it was not yet formally denominated as a law school and was still a mere department within the College of Letters. On November 12, 1912, the Board of Regents voted to approve the recommendation of a special committee made up of attorney regents for the organization of a School of Jurisprudence at Berkeley. Jones was appointed as the first dean of the new school. He continued to serve in that capacity until his retirement on June 30, 1923.After World War I ended in 1918, a wave of young people flooded into American law schools, and by 1921, enrollment had grown to 285. This proved to be too much for the school's beautiful but tiny Beaux-Arts building, with everyone from the dean on down complaining incessantly for three decades about extreme overcrowding in Boalt Hall. The Great Depression caused even more young people to seek refuge from the economic crisis in law school, with enrollment reaching 297. By 1946, enrollment had stabilized at 275, but this was still far too many people for Boalt Hall. Other California law schools started to expand rapidly during and after World War II, but the School of Jurisprudence desperately needed to replace its building first.
In 1946, planning began for a new law school building in the southeastern corner of the Berkeley campus at Bancroft Way and College Avenue. This project had to compete for funding against many other campus projects which had been severely delayed by the Great Depression and then World War II. When it turned out the $1.35 million allocated by the state government would be insufficient, the School of Jurisprudence raised $885,000 from private sources to make up the difference.
School of Law
After World War II, the greatest problem facing the School of Jurisprudence was the considerable political pressure to ease up on admissions standards and grow larger to accommodate a surge of interest in legal careers from G.I. Bill veterans and baby boomers. Hastings underwent rapid expansion to meet this demand, while in 1947, Southern Californians finally succeeded in persuading the state legislature to appropriate over a million dollars for the construction of a law school at the University of California, Los Angeles. The faculty at Berkeley came to understand that these developments were beneficial—in that they relieved pressure to compromise on their standards—which explains why they later supported and worked on the creation of another UC law school at Davis during the 1960s. It was Berkeley's ability to hold the line on its elitist standards which led to its ascent to the top tier of American law schools by the 1990s.The founding of the UCLA School of Law greatly affected the existing School of Jurisprudence at Berkeley. The general pattern was that UCLA Law managed to secure to itself this or that privilege, and then either the privilege also happened to inure to Berkeley's benefit, or Berkeley insisted on parity and got it.
The most important one was the right to be formally called a law school. In 1948, William Lloyd Prosser visited UCLA after he was selected to become the next dean at Berkeley—but before formally assuming office—in order to assist with the planning for UCLA Law. During his visit, Prosser heard from Grant about how a bill had been passed to create a "school of law" at UCLA even though Hastings was supposed to be the UC "law department" and decided that Berkeley could get away with the same thing. Although Berkeley and Hastings were notorious for their coldly distant relationship, Prosser and the dean at Hastings, David E. Snodgrass, had been friends since their days as classmates at Harvard College. Thus, Snodgrass openly supported Berkeley's name change and Prosser agreed to not challenge legislative appropriations for Hastings. Effective July 1, 1950, the School of Jurisprudence became the School of Law.
The California Law Review was historically run as a nonprofit corporation independent of the School of Jurisprudence which relied largely on income from subscriptions and advertising. By 1948, this income was insufficient in the face of postwar inflation, and the law review was running up a budget deficit. L. Dale Coffman, UCLA Law's first dean, initially proposed in 1950 that either Berkeley and UCLA could produce a joint law review, or that all the state's law schools could join forces to produce a single law review. After Berkeley rejected both proposals, Coffman persuaded the board of regents in 1952 to provide a full subsidy for the UCLA Law Review, and then in 1953, Berkeley demanded and obtained a similar subsidy for the California Law Review, which became a regular budget item for the law school.
Through his alliance with the conservative regents who had hired him, Coffman was able to secure an unusual amount of autonomy for the law faculty at Los Angeles from the Academic Senate with respect to appointments, courses, and budgets. However, the resulting 1952 amendments to the regents' standing orders were so broadly worded as to affect all UC professional schools offering courses only at the graduate level. The amendments greatly benefited the law faculty at Berkeley by granting them similar autonomy, but also engendered intense resentment towards them from the faculty of all other academic units at the Berkeley campus—who proceeded to strip the law faculty of the right to sit on any Academic Senate committee with power over appointments, courses, or budgets outside of the law school. The deep rupture between the law and non-law faculty caused great consternation for Clark Kerr throughout his term as Berkeley chancellor, as well as his early years as university president. It was not until 1961 that a satisfactory compromise was reached by which the School of Law faculty were restored to full Senate membership.