UC Berkeley School of Law

The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, commonly referred to as Berkeley Law and Boalt Hall, is one of 14 schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley Law is consistently regarded as an elite and prestigious law school (with acceptance rates lower than every U.S. law school except Yale and Stanford).^[3] The law school has produced leaders in law, government, and society, including: Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, Secretary of State of the United States Dean Rusk, Attorney General of the United States Edwin Meese, United States Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve G. William Miller, Solicitor General of the United States Theodore Olson, and lead litigator of the Korematsu v. United States Civil Rights Case Dale Minami.

History

The Department of Jurisprudence was founded at Berkeley in 1894. In 1912, the department was renamed the School of Jurisprudence, which was then renamed the School of Law in 1950.

The School was originally located in the center of the main UC Berkeley campus in the Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, built in 1911 with funds largely from Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt donated in memory of her late husband, John Henry Boalt. In 1951, the School moved to its current location in the new Boalt Hall, at the southeast corner of the campus, and the old Boalt Hall was renamed Durant Hall.

In April 2008, the law school rebranded itself from "Boalt Hall" to "Berkeley Law", in order to more closely tie the law school's name with the campus upon which it resides. The administration hopes that this move will further increase the law school's prestige, since people will now associate it with the Berkeley campus.^[4][5]

Academics

Boalt Hall has approximately 850 J.D. students, 100 students in the LL.M. and J.S.D. programs, and 45 students in the Ph.D. program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. The School also features specialized curricular programs in Business, Law and Economics, Comparative Legal Studies, Environmental Law, International Legal Studies, Law and Technology, and Social Justice.

The JD program's admissions process is highly selective. Boalt Hall is known to value high undergraduate GPAs, perhaps even more than high LSAT scores. Consequently, Berkeley has the fourth highest 75th percentile GPA, surpassed only by Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School. According to U.S. News and World Report, Boalt has the third-lowest acceptance rate among American law schools, with about 10% of applicants admitted; only Yale and Stanford have lower rates. Most recently, admitted applicants generally have an undergraduate GPA of between 3.7 and 3.9 and a Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score of between 165 and 170 (92nd and 98th percentile of all test-takers).

Boalt's grading system for the JD program is unusual among law schools. Students are graded on a High Honors (HH), Honors (H), and Pass (P) scale. Approximately 60% of the students in each class receive a grade of Pass, 30% receive a grade of Honors, and the highest 10% receive a grade of High Honors; lower grades of Substandard Pass (or Pass Conditional, abbreviated PC) and No Credit (NC) may be awarded at the discretion of professors. The top student in each class or section receives the Jurisprudence Award, while the second-place student receives the Prosser Prize.

For a typical class in the JD program, the average age of admitted students is 24 years old, over a range of ages from 20 to 48 years old. As state institutions, Boalt and UCLA had the lowest tuition of the top 15 law schools in the country in 2005. The tuition for the 2008-09 school year is $35,847 for California residents ($48,091 for nonresidents), though the sum has been rising each year.

The faculty of Berkeley Law also provide academic direction and the bulk of the instruction for the undergraduate program in Legal Studies, which is organized as a major in Letters and Science. The Legal Studies program is not intended as a pre-law program, but rather as a liberal arts program "that can encourage sustained reflection on fundamental values." ^[6]

Berkeley Law has a chapter of the Order of the Coif, a national law school honorary society founded for the purposes of encouraging legal scholarship and advancing the ethical standards of the legal profession.^[7]

It is an American Bar Association approved law school since 1923.^[8] It joined the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 1912.^[9]

Rankings

Over the last five years, US News & World Report has ranked Boalt Hall as high as 6th and low as 9th in the United States.^[1] It has the second smallest student body and the smallest student/faculty ratio of all the UC schools.^[10] While it is the most expensive law school in the UC system, it is only slightly more expensive than UCLA.^[11] However, it grants a median amount in financial aid for the system, and students tend to graduate with the least amount of debt on average than most of the other UC schools, with the exception of Davis.^[12][13]

According to Brian Leiter's Law School rankings, Boalt ranks 7th in the nation in terms of scholarly impact as measured by academic citations of tenure-stream faculty.^[14] In terms of student numerical quality, Boalt ranks 14th in the nation.^[15]

According to The Daily Journal, 15 of the top 100 lawyers in California are Boalt alumni. Law and Politics' Super Lawyers magazine ranks Boalt as #9 in the country, just above Yale Law based on the amount of Super Lawyers it produces.^[16] 890 alumni are in their list of the top 5% of peer rated attorneys for 2009.

It is listed as "A" (#5) in the January 2011 "Best Public Interest Law Schools" ratings by The National Jurist: The Magazine for Law Students.^[17]

Bar passage rates

Based on a 2001-2007 6 year average, 88.1% of UC Berkeley Law graduates passed the California State Bar.^[18]

Post-graduation employment

Based on a 2001-2007 6 year average, 98.8% of UC Berkeley Law graduates were employed 9 months after graduation.^[18]

Boalt Hall in popular culture

• Sandy Cohen, a character on the popular television series The O.C., is a lawyer and a Boalt Hall alumnus. "The O.C. at Boalt" is a student group that, in addition to screening episodes of The O.C. during the lunch period, offers the Sandy Cohen Fellowship, a summer grant for students who plan to work as public defenders (on The O.C., Sandy Cohen worked as a public defender while living in Orange County). In recent years, "The O.C. at Boalt" has also managed to bring Peter Gallagher, the actor who plays Sandy Cohen, to Boalt to speak on an annual basis.
• Matthew Perry played a Republican graduate of Boalt Hall on multiple episodes of The West Wing.
• Kelly Rutherford played lawyer Samantha 'Sonny' Liston, a graduate of Boalt Hall, on E-Ring.
• Joanie Caucus, a character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury, attended Boalt Hall.
• In Catch Me if You Can, Martin Sheen plays Roger Strong, the District Attorney of New Orleans and a Boalt Hall alumnus.
• In the movie Intolerable Cruelty, a copy of the California Law Review is featured prominently on a table in the senior partner's office.

Centers at Berkeley Law

• Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice (est. 2006)
• Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (est. 1996)
• Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and the Economy (est. 2004)
• Center for Law, Energy & the Environment
• Center for Clinical Education (est. 1998)
• Center for the Study of Law and Society (est. 1961)
• Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity
• Death Penalty Clinic (est. 2001)
• Institute for Global Challenges and the Law
• Institute for Legal Research (formerly the Earl Warren Legal Institute) (est. 1963)
• International Human Rights Law Clinic (est. 1998)
• Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs (est. 2000)
• Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance (est. 1994)
• Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic (est. 2000)
• Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice (est. 1999)

Law Journals at Berkeley Law

• Asian American Law Journal
• Berkeley Business Law Journal
• Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy
• Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law
• Berkeley Journal of Entertainment & Sports Law
• Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice
• Berkeley Journal of International Law
• Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern & Islamic Law
• Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
• Berkeley Technology Law Journal
• Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law
• California Law Review
• Ecology Law Quarterly

List of noted alumni

• Earl Warren, 1914 - Governor of California, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
• Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong, 1915 - professor at Boalt from 1919 to 1957, the first woman law professor at a major American law school
• Hugh Samuel Johnson, 1916, Administrator of the National Recovery Administration (1933–1934) during the Great Depression
• Walter Gordon, 1922 - first All-American at UC Berkeley, first African American graduate of Boalt Hall, Governor of the United States Virgin Islands, Federal District Judge.^[19]
• Roger J. Traynor, 1927 - Chief Justice, California Supreme Court, 1964–1970
• Melvin Belli, 1929 - attorney known as The King of Torts
• Dean Rusk, 1940 - United States Secretary of State, 1961–1969
• Harry Pregerson, 1950 - Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• G. William Miller, 1952 - U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
• Allen Broussard, 1953 - Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, 1981–1991
• Jess Jackson, 1955 - Notable Attorney in the '70s; founder of Kendall-Jackson Wines
• J. Clifford Wallace, 1955 - Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Cruz Reynoso, 1958 - Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, 1982–1987
• Edwin Meese III, 1958 - former U.S. Attorney General
• Senior Chief Judge Lloyd D. George, 1961- Federal judge on the United States District Court for the District of Nevada in the US Courts.
• Pete Wilson, 1962 - former U.S. Senator, Governor of California
• Thelton Henderson, 1962 - Judge, United States District Court for the Northern District of California
• Kathryn M. Werdegar, 1962 - Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, 1994–present
• William B. Shubb, 1963 - appointed Senior Chief Judge of the Eastern District of California in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals of the U.S. Courts system in 2004.
• Henry Ramsey, 1963 - former Alameda County Superior Court judge and former dean of Howard Law School
• Rose Bird, 1965 - Chief Justice, California Supreme Court, 1977–1987
• Howard Lincoln, 1965 - Chairman and CEO of the Seattle Mariners; former chairman of Nintendo of America
• Theodore Olson, 1965 - U.S. Solicitor General, 2001–2004
• Michael Tigar, 1966 - Professor at Washington College of Law, American University
• Larry W. Sonsini, 1966 - Chairman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
• Neil Goldschmidt, 1967 - U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Governor of Oregon
• David B. Frohnmayer, 1967 - Oregon Attorney General, University of Oregon President
• Robert K. Tanenbaum, 1968 - novelist and former Mayor of Beverly Hills, CA
• Larry Hillblom, co-founder of DHL Express
• Judge Lawrence R. Leavitt, 1969 - Magistrate Judge in the District of Nevada, a division of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals of the U.S. Courts system.
• David Weissbrodt, 1969 - former head of United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights of non-citizens
• Mary C. Dunlap, 1971 - feminist and queer activist and co-founder of Equal Rights Advocates
• Dale Minami, 1971 - leader of legal team that overturned the wrongful conviction of Fred Korematsu
• Mario G. Olmos, 1971 - former presiding judge of Fresno County Superior Court and notable attorney
• William Horsley Orrick Sr., 1941 - founding member of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
• Neil Gotanda, 1972 - Professor at Western State University College of Law and expert in constitutional law and Asian American jurisprudence
• Michael H. Posner, 1972 - Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) of the United States
• Marsha S. Berzon, 1973 - Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• John L. Burris, 1973 - civil rights attorney
• Anthony Ishii, - Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California
• Leigh Steinberg, 1973 - sports agent
• Richard Delgado, 1974 - Professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law and expert in civil rights law and critical race theory
• Barry Scheck, 1974 - co-founder of the Innocence Project
• Christopher Schroeder, 1974 - Professor at Duke University School of Law
• Lance Ito, 1975 - California Superior Court judge, presided over O.J. Simpson criminal trial
• Katharine Bartlett, 1975 - Dean of Duke University School of Law
• Zoë Baird, 1977 - Bill Clinton's first unsuccessful nominee for attorney general in 1993.
• David M. Louie, 1977 - Attorney General of Hawaii
• Elizabeth Cabraser, 1978 - partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP
• André Bertrand, 1978 - French attorney, successful author of many treatises in the area of Intellectual Property
• George B. Daniels, 1978 – Judge, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (2000–)
• Nancy K.D. Lemon, 1980 - domestic violence law expert, lecturer at Boalt Hall
• Frederick Hertz, 1981 - notable San Francisco Bay attorney
• William S. Price III, 1981, co-founder, Texas Pacific Group
• Paul Krekorian, 1984 - California State Assemblyman and former Member of Burbank, CA Board of Education and City Council
• Catherine Fisk, 1986 - Professor at Duke University School of Law
• Kevin Quinn, S.J., 1988, Jesuit, law professor, President of the University of Scranton since 2011
• Reynato S. Puno MA of Laws - Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
• David Kappos, 1990 - Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, Director of US Patent and Trademark Office
• Craig Walker (businessman), 1995 - founder of Grandcentral, Yahoo! Voice, Entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures

List of noted faculty

• Stephen Barnett (1935–2009), legal scholar who opposed the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970^[20]
• Bob Berring – leading law librarian
• Robert Cooter – leading scholar in Law and Economics
• Maria Echaveste – former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton
• Christopher Edley, Jr. – Dean of Boalt Hall (2004-); co-founder of The Civil Rights Project formerly at Harvard University.
• Aaron Edlin – Richard W. Jennings '39 Endowed Chair since 2005
• Melvin A. Eisenberg – author of a leading Contracts casebook and chief reporter for the Principles of Corporate Governance, issued by the American Law Institute
• William A. Fletcher – Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Phillip P. Frickey – pioneer in the study of legislation and statutory interpretation
• Lucas Guttentag – founding director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Immigrants' Rights Project
• Ian F. Haney Lopez – influential critical race theorist and author of White By Law
• Angela P. Harris – leading scholar of feminist legal theory and critical race theory
• Michael Heyman – Chancellor of the Berkeley campus (1980 to 1990), Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1994 to 1999)
• Phillip E. Johnson – professor of law and one of the fathers of intelligent design
• Amy Kapczynski – co-founder of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines
• Herma Hill Kay – former Dean of the School of Law (1992–2000), instrumental in the battle for no-fault divorce in California
• Hans Kelsen – one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century
• Linda H. Krieger – employment discrimination law expert
• Goodwin Liu – constitutional law professor, associate dean, and former controversial nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who withdrew as a nominee when it became clear that he would not be confirmed by the United States Senate. Associate Justice, California Supreme Court (2011-Present). ^[21]
• Justin McCrary – labor economist; co-director of the Berkeley Law and Economics Program and the NBER Crime Working Group
• Paul J. Mishkin – former author of the popular casebook on Federal Courts, Hart and Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System
• John T. Noonan, Jr. – Senior Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• William L. Prosser – former Dean of the School of Law (1948–1961), author of several well-known treatises and pioneer in the field of strict products liability
• Pamela Samuelson – intellectual property law expert
• Sho Sato – first Asian American law professor at a major American law school
• Paul Schwartz – leading international scholar of information privacy law
• Eleanor Swift – led the establishment of Boalt's Center for Clinical Education, which brings clients in need of legal advice to Boalt, where students and faculty provide counsel.
• Charles Weisellberg – 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments Scholar.
• John Wilkins – first African American professor at Boalt
• John Yoo – former deputy assistant Attorney General and author of controversial (and subsequently withdrawn) Justice Department memoranda relating to Presidential wartime authority.^[22][23]

See also

References

External links

• UC Berkeley School of Law Official website
• boalt.org - Website for student groups and journals
• Boalt Hall Turns 100 - Berkeleyan, November 11, 1994