University of California College of the Law, San Francisco
The University of California College of the Law, San Francisco is a public law school in San Francisco, California, United States. It was formerly known as the University of California, Hastings College of the Law from its founding in 1878 until its renaming in 2023.
Founded in 1878 by Serranus Clinton Hastings, UC Law SF was the first law school of the University of California as well as one of the first law schools established in California. Although part of the University of California, UC Law SF is not directly governed by the Regents of the University of California.
History
Founding of the law school
In 1878, Serranus Clinton Hastings, the first chief justice of California, gave $100,000 to be used to create the law school that once bore his name. He arranged for the enactment of a legislative act on March 26, 1878, to create the Hastings College of the Law as a separate legal entity affiliated with the University of California. This was apparently intended for compatibility with Section 8 of the university's Organic Act, which authorized the board of regents to affiliate with independent self-sustaining professional colleges. Another reason for making the gift in this fashion was that Hastings desired to impose certain conditions on his gift, while "policy and law dictated that a free-gift could not be hedged by power of reversion."According to the Hastings College of the Law's official centennial history, its founder, "whether from arrogance, oversight, ignorance, or a combination of all three, was the author of his own troubles." Although the founder had selected the original Hastings board of directors from among his professional acquaintances, he failed to adequately verify their concurrence with his beliefs that a proper legal education must include a course in legal ethics and must also be hybridized with elements of a liberal arts education. To his horror, it turned out they all believed that the only purpose of a law school was to provide vocational education in how to practice law. This latter belief was shared by the first professor hired, John Norton Pomeroy, who personally taught the vast majority of courses during the law school's early years. The founder hoped to educate cultured intellectuals who also happened to be lawyers; the board simply wanted to produce lawyers. It was impossible to reconcile these fundamentally different visions, and by September 1882, the founder had become estranged from his own handpicked board. By that point in time, he had come to see the UC Board of Regents as a superior vehicle for infusing liberal arts and legal ethics into his law school, and in March 1883 arranged for another legislative act that purported to transfer the Hastings College of the Law directly to the University of California and vested responsibility for its governance in the regents. This was in facial conflict with the "affiliate" language in Section 8 of the Organic Act, so in March 1885, another act was passed to create a pro forma board of trustees for the sole purpose of holding title to the law school's assets at arm's length from the regents.
In deference to the 1883 act, the Hastings board of directors ceased to meet. But because the regents chose to remain neutral in the long-simmering dispute between board and founder—and did not attempt to exercise any control under the 1883 or 1885 acts—Hastings went through a strange period from September 1882 to April 1885 where it operated with no actual supervision from any governing board.
On April 25, 1885, the Hastings board of directors convened to appoint Perrie Kewen as the new registrar, because the previous registrar had died. At the request of Serranus Clinton Hastings, Attorney General Edward C. Marshall challenged Kewen's appointment by initiating a proceeding for a writ of quo warranto in San Francisco County Superior Court. On March 30, 1886, in what became known as Kewen's Case, the Supreme Court of California upheld Kewen's appointment by declaring the 1883 and 1885 acts to be unconstitutional on the basis of a provision of the 1879 state constitution guaranteeing the legislative independence of the University of California. In other words, the 1879 ratification of the state's second constitution effectively stripped the California State Legislature of the power to amend preexisting statutes governing the University of California, including the 1878 act. This was the last time that Serranus Clinton Hastings would try to shape the future of the law school that he had founded; the Hastings College of the Law has maintained its hard-fought independence from the Regents ever since. The irony of Kewen's Case is that a constitutional provision intended to protect the University of California was applied in such a way as to prevent the university from taking control of its first law school.
In contrast, the "Affiliated Colleges" — the medical, dental, nursing, and pharmacy schools in San Francisco — were affiliated with the University of California through written agreements, and not statutes invested with constitutional importance by court decisions. In the early 20th century, the Affiliated Colleges agreed to voluntarily submit to the regents' governance during the term of UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, as the UC Board of Regents had come to recognize the problems inherent in the existence of independent entities that shared the UC brand but over which the university had no real control. While Hastings remained independent, the Affiliated Colleges began to increasingly coordinate with each other and the rest of the UC bureaucracy in Berkeley under the supervision of the president and the regents, and evolved into the health sciences campus known today as the University of California, San Francisco.
The part-time law school
In 1899, the Hastings board of directors declined an invitation from the regents to join the Affiliated Colleges at their new campus at Parnassus Heights. The board was reluctant to move the law school from its traditional Civic Center location, but this doomed the law school to five more decades of wandering from one temporary site to the next, for a total of 16 different locations between its founding and the opening of a permanent campus in 1953.In 1900, Hastings College of the Law became one of 27 charter members of the Association of American Law Schools.
The Hastings College of the Law was for many years considered the primary law school of the University of California with the purpose of preparing lawyers for the practice of law in the state, whereas the Department of Jurisprudence on the Berkeley campus—which later became the School of Jurisprudence, then Boalt Hall School of Law, and now Berkeley Law—was intended for the study of law as an academic discipline. Both schools were launched with one professor assisted by part-time instructors who also happened to be practicing lawyers. During the early 20th century, Berkeley initiated a rapid transition to hiring full-time lecturers and professors to teach the majority of its law courses, but Hastings did not. After Berkeley started to award law degrees in May 1903, Berkeley swiftly eclipsed Hastings and pushed the older law school into a long period of severe decline. Enrollment at Hastings plunged from 100 students in 1912 to only 76 by 1915.
During this difficult era, Hastings was widely seen as a homeless, "peripatetic law school" with part-time faculty teaching part-time working students whom for whatever reason were unable to attend a full-time law school program. With no permanent campus, Hastings could not build its own academic law library, then regarded as an essential component of a law school, and was forced to rely on the city's public law library. As a result, Hastings was involuntarily ejected from AALS twice, in 1916 and 1927.
Even the deanship was a part-time job before 1933. This explains how Edward Robeson Taylor could simultaneously serve as dean of Hastings, dean of a medical college, chairman of the board of trustees of the San Francisco Public Library, poet laureate of San Francisco, and Mayor of San Francisco. His successor, Maurice E. Harrison, simultaneously served as dean of Hastings, regent of the University of California, and partner at a predecessor of the modern Morrison & Foerster law firm. It was not until William M. Simmons served as dean from 1925 to 1940 that the deanship was converted to a full-time position.
The same statute that affiliated Hastings with the University of California also designated the Hastings College of the Law as the University of California's "law department." According to the University of California, Los Angeles political science professor J.A.C. Grant, it was believed there could only be one "law department", which is why the Department of Jurisprudence at Berkeley retained its name even after it began to award law degrees. The University of California, Berkeley did not rename its School of Jurisprudence to a School of Law until the state legislature passed a bill in 1947 authorizing UCLA to create a "school of law." Boalt Hall's newly-hired dean, William Lloyd Prosser, got wind of this in 1948 while visiting UCLA to help plan the new law school and decided that Berkeley could get away with the same thing.
Transformation
Hastings College of the Law underwent a dramatic transformation under the leadership of David E. Snodgrass, who served as dean from 1940 to 1963. Snodgrass was a "feisty, outspoken advocate" who fought fiercely as dean to elevate the law school's profile both within California and at the national level. The only reason why Hastings and Berkeley's coldly distant relationship remained collegial during most of his deanship—to the extent that Snodgrass openly supported the name change of the School of Jurisprudence and Prosser agreed to not challenge legislative appropriations for Hastings—was that he and Prosser had been friends since their days as classmates at Harvard College.During the post–World War II economic expansion, Snodgrass was able to capitalize on a massive surge of interest in legal careers among G.I. Bill veterans and baby boomers. With its flexible part-time program, its heavy reliance on part-time instructors who made up the majority of its faculty, its habit of holding classes in any space it could scrounge up, and its lenient admission requirement of only two years of college-level work, Hastings could expand very quickly in a way that elitist, bureaucratic Boalt Hall could not. Enrollment at Hastings exploded from 300 in 1941 to 496 in 1946 and to 917 in 1949. It was the rapid postwar expansion of Hastings which enabled Boalt Hall to vault into the top tier of American law schools by the 1990s, by relieving political pressure on the law faculty at Berkeley to compromise on their strict standards for student admissions and faculty hiring.
It was Snodgrass who finally found Hastings a permanent home. He obtained an appropriation of $1.45 million from the state legislature and additional funding in the amount of $300,000 from the UC Board of Regents towards the construction of the law school's first permanent building, which opened on March 26, 1953. The building was later renamed Snodgrass Hall in honor of the man who had brought it into existence, and was the center of academic life at Hastings for over six decades before its demolition in October 2020.