For the first time in eight years, it appears a new law school with plans to get ABA accreditation will open.
Jacksonville University College of Law will be Florida’s first new law school in more than 20 years when it plans to open this fall. It is the first new law school to seek ABA accreditation since The University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law opened in 2014, and only the second new law school in the past ten years.
High Point University in North Carolina also announced plans to open a law school. It plans to start in fall 2024.
Jacksonville University officials  recently announced that the new law program will be funded partly by the City of Jacksonville, which has pledged $5 million to get the school off the ground. And it hopes to enroll between 20 to 30 students in the first year and grow enrollment to 150 by Fall 2024.
Jacksonville officials reported tuition will be $36,000 annually with merit scholarships also available. Applications are currently being accepted. The law school will be housed away from the main campus in a downtown office building, according to Reuters.
The move comes as the city’s only other law school, Florida Coastal School of Law, is in the process of closing. Florida Coastal, a for-profit law school, was founded in 1996, but ran into problems with the U.S. Department of Education, and lost the ability for its students to get Federal loans. At one point, Florida Coastal had more than 1,000 students.
Without Florida Coastal, Jacksonville is one of only three metropolitan regions with 1.5 million or more residents without an ABA-approved law school. The other two regions — Charlotte, N.C. and Riverside, Calif., were both home to ABA law schools until recent years. Charlotte School of Law closed in 2017, and University of La Verne in Ontario, Calif., which dropped its ABA accreditation in 2019.
High Point University is just outside of the Charlotte metropolitan region, along with Wake Forest University and Elon Law School. The university is planning to build an 80,000 square foot law building, and has hired a dean. It is a private university and is affiliated with the United Methodist church.
