University of Texas School of Law

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The University of Texas
School of Law
Established 1883
School type Public
Dean Lawrence Sager (Dean)
Location Austin, Texas, USA
Enrollment 1,484
Faculty
USNWR ranking 16
Bar pass rate 92.04%
Annual tuition $20,022 (Texas resident)
$33,492 (non-resident)
Homepage http://www.utexas.edu/law/

The University of Texas School of Law is an ABA-certified American law school located on The University of Texas at Austin campus. The law school has been in existence since the founding of the University in 1883. It was one of only two schools at the University when it was founded, the other being the liberal arts school. The school offers both Juris Doctor and Master of Laws degrees.[1]

The law school is consistently ranked among the top twenty law schools in the nation and has a reputation for turning out high-profile lawyers and public servants. The school is currently ranked #16 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.[2]

The law school had its racially-based admission policies struck down by courts on two separate occasions.

Contents

[edit] History

Founded in 1883.

[edit] Sweatt v. Painter

The school was involved in the 1950 United States Supreme Court case of Sweatt v. Painter. The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law on the grounds that substantially equivalent facilities (meeting the requirements of Plessy v. Ferguson) were offered by a law school open only to blacks. At the time the plaintiff first applied to The University of Texas, there was no law school in Texas which admitted blacks. The Texas trial court, instead of granting the plaintiff a writ of mandamus, continued the case for six months allowing the state time to create a law school only for blacks.

The Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision saying that the separate school failed to measure up because of quantitative differences in facilities and intangible factors such as its isolation from most of the future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact. The documentation of the court's decision includes the following differences in facilities between The University of Texas Law School and the separate law school for blacks: The University of Texas School of Law had 16 full-time and 3 part-time professors, 850 students and a law library of 65,000 volumes, while the separate school had 5 full-time professors, 23 students and a library of 16,500 volumes.

The court held that education could be measured only in intangibles.

[edit] Hopwood v. Texas

In 1992, plaintiff Cheryl Hopwood, a White American woman, was denied admission to the School of Law despite being better qualified than many admitted minority candidates. Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka later described Hopwood as "the perfect plaintiff to question the fairness of reverse discrimination" because of her academic credentials and the personal hardships she had endured (including a young daughter suffering from a muscular disease).

The case of Hopwood v. Texas was the first successful legal challenge to racial preferences in student admissions since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The court decided that the school "may not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit in order to achieve a diverse student body, to combat the perceived effects of a hostile environment at the law school, to alleviate the law school's poor reputation in the minority community, or to eliminate any present effects of past discrimination by actors other than the law school."

However, in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case involving the University of Michigan, that the United States Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." This effectively reversed the decision of Hopwood v. Texas.

[edit] Notable alumni

[edit] References

  1. ^ History of the Law School. The University of Texas School of Law. Retrieved on 9 April 2006.
  2. ^ Search - Law - Best Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report
  3. ^ Waters, Lawrence Leslie (1950). Steel Trails to Santa Fe. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, p 421. 

[edit] External links

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