University of Texas School of Law
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| The University of Texas School of Law |
|
| Established | 1883 |
|---|---|
| School type | Public |
| President | Lawrence Sager (Dean) |
| Location | Austin, Texas, USA |
| Enrollment | 1,484 |
| Faculty | |
| USNWR ranking | #16 in top tier |
| 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 (according to U.S. News & World Report), and has a reputation for turning out outstanding lawyers and public servants. The school is ranked eighth for faculty quality in Leiter's Law School Rankings.
The law school maintains a median GPA of 3.42, among the highest of all law schools. It runs a Supreme Court Clinic which as of January 2007 is preparing a case before the Supreme Court of the United States.[2]
The law school has the dubious distinction of having its racially-based admission policies struck down by courts on two separate occasions.
The law school is one of four buildings on the campus to have a storm siren system installed in early 2007.[1]
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[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 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
- James Baker — former Secretary of State
- Paul Begala — political consultant, commentator and former advisor to President Bill Clinton
- Lloyd Bentsen — former Secretary of the Treasury
- George P. Bush — son of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, nephew of President George W. Bush
- Tom C. Clark — former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and United States Attorney General
- John B. Connally, Jr. — former Governor of Texas, former Secretary of the Navy, former Secretary of the Treasury
- Chancy Croft — former member of the Alaska House of Representatives
- Leon A. Green — long-time dean at Northwestern University School of Law and professor at UT and at Yale Law School; authored pioneering works in tort law
- Kay Bailey Hutchison — senior United States Senator from Texas
- Joe Jamail — billionaire litigator and philanthropist
- Edith Jones — Chief Justice of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
- W. Page Keeton — 1931 graduate and Dean from 1949 to 1974; expert in Torts
- Samuel B. Kent — United States District Judge, Southern District of Texas, Galveston
- Ron Kirk — former mayor of Dallas, Texas
- Thomas Mengler — dean of the law school at University of St. Thomas (Minnesota); former dean at the University of Illinois College of Law.
- Gene R. Nichol — President of the College of William and Mary; former dean of the law schools at North Carolina and Colorado.
- Federico Peña — former Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Energy
- Robert Schwarz Strauss — former United States Ambassador to Russia
- Sarah Weddington — represented Jane Roe in the landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade
- Harry Whittington — Well known Texas attorney for the hunting incident with Dick Cheney and also eminent domain cases.
- Chad McCracken-notorious Jack of All Trades
- Bryan Burg-lover not a fighter
[edit] References
- ^ History of the Law School. The University of Texas School of Law. Retrieved on 9 April 2006.
- ^ "Newly Formed Supreme Court Clinic Persuades U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Case", University of Texas at Austin, January 10, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-01-25.
