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The University of Texas School of Law | |
---|---|
Parent school | University of Texas at Austin |
Established | 1883 |
School type | Public law school |
Endowment | $215.5 million (2018) [1] [2] |
Dean | Bobby Chesney [3] |
Location | Austin, Texas, United States 30°17′19″N97°43′51″W / 30.288666°N 97.730762°W |
Enrollment | 985 (2023) [4] |
Faculty | 311 (2023) [4] |
USNWR ranking | 16th (tied) (2024) [5] |
Bar pass rate | 94.01% (2023) [6] |
Website | law |
The University of Texas School of Law (Texas Law) is the law school of the University of Texas at Austin, a public research university in Austin, Texas. According to Texas Law’s ABA disclosures, 87.20% of the Class of 2022 obtained full-time, long-term bar passage required employment (i.e. as attorneys) nine months after graduation. [7]
In 2017, the school had 19,000 living alumni. [8] Amongst its alumni are former U.S. Supreme Court Justice and U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark; former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker; former U.S. Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen; former White House Senior Advisor Paul Begala; former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn; former litigator Sarah Weddington who represented Jane Roe in the landmark case Roe v Wade ; and Wallace B. Jefferson, the first African American Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
The University of Texas School of Law was founded in 1883. [8] Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, the school was limited to white students, but the school's admissions policies were challenged from two different directions in high-profile 20th century federal court cases that were important to the long struggle over segregation, integration, and diversity in American education.
The school was sued in the civil rights case of Sweatt v. Painter (1950). The case involved Heman Marion Sweatt, a black man who was refused admission to the school on the grounds that substantially equivalent facilities (meeting the requirements of Plessy v. Ferguson ) were offered by the state's law school for blacks. When the plaintiff first applied to the University of Texas, there was no law school in Texas which admitted blacks. Instead of granting the plaintiff a writ of mandamus, the Texas trial court "continued" the case for six months to allow the state time to create a law school for blacks, which it developed in Houston.
The Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision, saying that the separate school failed to offer Sweatt an equal legal education. The court noted that the University of Texas School of Law had 16 full-time and three part-time professors, 850 students and a law library of 65,000 volumes, while the separate school the state set up for blacks had five full-time professors, 23 students and a library of 16,500 volumes. But the court held that even "more important" than these quantitative differences were differences such as "reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige". Because the separate school could not provide an "equal" education, the court ordered that Hemann Sweatt be admitted to University of Texas School of Law.
Sweatt v. Painter was the first major test case in the long-term litigation strategy of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that led to the landmark Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. [9] Marshall and the NAACP correctly calculated that they could dismantle segregation by building up a series of precedents, beginning at Texas Law, before moving on to the more explosive question of racial integration in elementary schools.
In 1992, plaintiff Cheryl Hopwood, a White American woman, sued the school on the grounds that she had not been admitted even though her grades and test scores were better than those of some minority candidates who were admitted pursuant to an affirmative action program. 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 personal hardships which she had endured (including a young daughter suffering from a muscular disease). [10]
With her attorney Steven Wayne Smith, later a two-year member of the Texas Supreme Court, Hopwood won her case, Hopwood v. Texas , in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled 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". [11] The case did not reach the Supreme Court.
However, the Supreme Court ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), 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. [12]
Texas Law is among the more selective law schools in the nation. For the class of 2019, 5,803 students applied and 1,017 (17.53%) were accepted. Of accepted students, 280 (27.53%) enrolled. The enrolled class of 2021 has a class median LSAT score of 169. The median GPA for the enrolled class is 3.80. [13] Women make up 57% of the class, and 32% of the class identify as minority students. The average age of the class was 24. Texas Law enrolled students from 25 US states for the class of 2019, with out-of state students comprising 32% of the class. [14] Emphasizing its role as a public institution, Texas Law is required by the state legislature to reserve 65% of the seats in each first-year class for Texas residents. [15]
Historically, Texas Law has been ranked the top law school in the state and the 15th best school in the nation by the legal news website Above the Law . [16] The U.S. News & World Report rankings, the most widely used and influential ranking of American law schools, ranked Texas Law as tied for the 16th best law school in the nation in 2020. [16] Additionally, Above the Law, which uses an outcome-focused ranking system, ranked Texas the 12th best law school in the U.S. in 2019. [17] In 2020, USNWR also ranked Texas as the 15th best law school in the U.S. for a student's return on investment. [18]
Students at the University of Texas School of Law publish thirteen law journals: [19]
The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice serves as a focal point for critical, interdisciplinary analysis and practice of human rights and social justice. [20] [21] The Rapoport Center was founded in 2004 by Professor Karen Engle, Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law, thanks to a donation from the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation to the University of Texas School of Law. [22] [23] The Rapoport Foundation was founded in 1986 by Bernard Rapoport and his wife Audre. In 2010, Daniel Brinks, Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, became co-director of the Center. [24] The Center has over one hundred affiliated faculty members from various schools and departments within the University of Texas at Austin.
In February 2013, the Rapoport Center received a three-year, $150,000 grant from the Creekmore and Adele Fath Charitable Foundation to highlight the life and career of Sissy Farenthold, an American Democratic politician, activist, lawyer and educator, perhaps best known for her run for Texas Governor and for her nomination for Vice President in the 1972 Democratic National Convention. [25] The project documents Farenthold's contributions to Texas and U.S. politics, the women's peace movement, and international human rights and justice. The Rapoport Center will work with the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (where Farenthold's papers are housed) in order to process and preserve Farenthold's papers, digitize archival documents and images, produce videotaped interviews, and expand the content of the Rapoport Center's website. [26]
In 2008 the law school announced the creation of the Center for Women in Law, [27] "To eliminate the barriers that have thwarted the advancement of women in the legal profession for the past several decades, and thereby enhance the legal profession and its ability to serve an increasingly diverse and globally connected society." [28]
The University of Texas School of Law Continuing Legal Education is one of the oldest and most distinguished providers of professional education in the country, offering over 50 advanced conferences annually that provide CLE and CPE credit to national legal and accounting professionals. Some of the School's signature programs include Stanley M. Johanson Estate Planning Workshop, Taxation Conference, Jay L. Westbrook Bankruptcy Law, Ernest E. Smith Oil, Gas and Mineral Law, Immigration and Nationality Law and Page Keeton Civil Litigation, which have been offered continuously for over 35 years. Other highly regarded programs in the portfolio include Mergers and Acquisitions Institute, International Upstream Energy Transactions, Parker C. Fielder Oil and Gas Tax (presented with the IRS) and Patent Law Institutes presented in Austin and at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Since 2005, Texas has had four alumni serve as judicial clerks at the United States Supreme Court. This record gives Texas a ranking in the top 20 among all law schools for supplying such law clerks for the period 2005-2017. Texas has placed 35 clerks at the U.S. Supreme Court in its history, ranked 13th among law schools; this group includes Diane Wood (class of 1975) who clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun during the 1976 Term, and is now the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
The Tarlton Law Library is one of the largest academic law libraries in the country, with a physical collection of more than a million volumes and extensive electronic resources. In addition to a comprehensive collection of United States primary and secondary legal materials in print and digital formats, Tarlton has a broad interdisciplinary collection from the social sciences and humanities. Special collections at Tarlton include significant foreign and international law resources; the papers of former United States Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark; feature films and fiction related to law and popular culture; and the Gavel Archive, a collection of feature films, TV shows, and fiction related to law and popular culture, all candidates for and winners of the American Bar Association’s prestigious Silver Gavel Award. Tarlton is a depository for United States, European Union, and Canadian government documents. Its extensive collection of rare and antiquarian law books includes noted collections of early legal dictionaries, Texas law, and the works of John Selden.
Texas has maintained strong employment outcomes for its graduates relative to other law schools. [29] According to UT official 2018 ABA-required disclosures, 85.0% of the Class of 2018 had obtained full-time, long-term, J.D.-required employment (i.e. as attorneys) nine months after graduation. [30] 92.8% of the class obtained employment in careers that preferred or required a J.D. [30] UT's Law School Transparency under-employment score is 7.2%, indicating the percentage of the Class of 2018 unemployed, pursuing an additional degree, or working in a non-professional, short-term, or part-time job nine months after graduation. [31]
The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) at Texas Law for the 2016–2017 academic year is $56,161 for residents and $73,831 for non-residents. [32] The Law School Transparency estimated debt-financed cost of attendance for three years is $197,389 for residents and $254,278 for nonresidents. [33]
The University of California, Davis School of Law is the professional graduate law school of the University of California, Davis. The school received ABA approval in 1968. It joined the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 1968.
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate".
Stanford Law School (SLS) is the law school of Stanford University, a private research university near Palo Alto, California. Established in 1893, Stanford Law had an acceptance rate of 6.28% in 2021, the second-lowest of any law school in the country. George Triantis currently serves as Dean.
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932, was the first successful legal challenge to a university's affirmative action policy in student admissions since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In Hopwood, four white plaintiffs who had been rejected from University of Texas at Austin's School of Law challenged the institution's admissions policy on equal protection grounds and prevailed. After seven years as a precedent in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the Hopwood decision was abrogated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.
Heman Marion Sweatt was an African-American civil rights activist who confronted Jim Crow laws. He is best known for the Sweatt v. Painter lawsuit, which challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine and was one of the earliest of the events that led to the desegregation of American higher education.
Charles Alan Wright was an American constitutional lawyer widely considered to be the foremost authority in the United States on constitutional law and federal procedure, and was the coauthor of the 54-volume treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure with Arthur R. Miller and Kenneth W. Graham, Jr., among others. He also served as a special legal consultant to President Richard Nixon during the congressional investigations into the Watergate break in and coverup, and for a time was the president's lead lawyer.
A. Leon Green was an American legal realist, a pioneer in Tort law, nationally known writer and scholar, and dean of Northwestern University School of Law for 38 years. Through his efforts, Northwestern had one of the strongest law schools in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He also served as professor at Yale Law School and the University of Texas School of Law. Green wrote the "groundbreaking book, The Rationale of Proximate Cause, in 1927.
Charles Tilford McCormick was an American university professor.
In the United States, affirmative action consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to groups considered or classified as historically excluded, specifically racial minorities and women. These programs tend to focus on access to education and employment in order to redress the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Another goal of affirmative action policies is to ensure that public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
The Thurgood Marshall School of Law (TMSL) is an ABA-accredited law school at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. It awards Juris Doctor and Master of Law degrees. Thurgood Marshall School of Law is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and Association of American Law Schools.
Mary Frances Tarlton "Sissy" Farenthold was an American politician, attorney, activist, and educator. She was best known for her two campaigns for governor of Texas in 1972 and 1974, and for being placed in nomination for vice president of the United States, finishing second at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She was elected as the first chair of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1973.
Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 332 U.S. 631 (1948), is a per curiam United States Supreme Court decision involving racial segregation toward African Americans by the University of Oklahoma and the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
William & Mary Law School, formally the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, is the law school of the College of William & Mary, a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is the oldest extant law school in the United States, having been founded in 1779 at the urging of alumnus Thomas Jefferson. As of 2023, it has an enrollment of 606 full-time students seeking a Juris Doctor (J.D.) or a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in the American Legal System, a two or three semester program for lawyers trained outside the United States.
Thomas Campbell Clark was an American lawyer who served as the 59th United States Attorney General from 1945 to 1949 and as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1949 to 1967.
Fisher v. University of Texas, 570 U.S. 297 (2013), also known as Fisher I, is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court voided the lower appellate court's ruling in favor of the university and remanded the case, holding that the lower court had not applied the standard of strict scrutiny, articulated in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), to its admissions program. The Court's ruling in Fisher took Grutter and Bakke as given and did not directly revisit the constitutionality of using race as a factor in college admissions.
Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law. She is also an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies and of Women's and Gender Studies. She teaches courses and specialized seminars in public international law, international human rights law, and legal theory.
Romeo Marcus Williams was an American civil rights attorney who organized large-scale student protests against segregation in Marshall, Texas. He was also a junior partner of Dallas, Texas civil rights attorney, William J. Durham, who served as lead counsel on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, Sweatt v. Painter, and Smith v. Allwright.