It was a good week for …
Building a reputation, after the three-year-old University of California-Irvine School of Law ranked seventh among law schools in a recent study measuring the scholarly impact of law faculty.
The new law school is one of three in California to crack the top ten, joining Stanford University (fourth) and the University of California-Berkeley (10th). Irvine’s inclusion is noteworthy because the rest of the top ten reads like a rolodex of elite names such as Yale, Harvard, Chicago, NYU, Columbia, and Cornell.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in St. Paul, Minn based on a methodology created by Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The score measures the influence of the tenured law faculty of a law school by citations in the legal literature in the past five years.
Construction workers in Topeka, Kansas, after Washburn University School of Law approved a new $40 million building for the law school on the university’s campus.
The school plans to finance the proposed 152,600-square-foot building through a $20 million fundraising effort by the Washburn University Foundation, along with $10 million coming from university reserve funds. The remaining $10 million will be borrowed through short-term bonds.
The school’s existing structure was built in 1969.
It was a bad week for …
Disciplined budgeting, after the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law reportedly made more financial aid commitments than the school had budgeted for. The school had set aside $550,000 in aid for first-year students, but made offers of more than $1.3 million.
The school said it will honor its offers for all three years that the students remain in law school, but the school will run a shortfall of almost $2.4 million over that period as a result. If the school cannot provide the aid, cuts may be required to programs and scholarships offered to first-year students next year, the school said.
The law school’s assistant dean of admissions, Brandon Hamilton, has resigned.
