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University of Texas School of Law
The University of Texas School of Law is an American Bar Association|ABA-certified United States|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 was the liberal arts school. The school offers both Juris Doctor and Master of Laws degrees.[Search - Law - Best Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report]
Admissions
UT Law is among the most selective law schools in the nation. For the 2008-2009 entering class, 24% of applicants were accepted with a class median Law School Admission Test|LSAT score of 167 and median GPA of 3.71. http://www.utexas.edu/law/depts/admissions/application/quickfacts.html Emphasizing its role as a public institution, UT Law reserves 65% of the seats in each first-year class for Texas residents.
History
The University of Texas School of Law was founded in 1883.
Limited to white students for decades, the school's admissions policies were challenged from different directions in two 20th century cases decided by the US Supreme Court. Since the Court's decision in a third case, ''Grutter v. Bollinger'' (2003), the court ruled a law school may use "narrowly tailored" considerations of race to further the benefits of a diverse student body. It has been involved in two high profile cases concerning race and admissions.
''Sweatt v. Painter'' (1950)
The school was sued in the civil rights Supreme Court of the United States|United States Supreme Court case of ''Sweatt v. Painter'' (1950). The case involved Heman Marion Sweatt, a black man 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 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, Texas.
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 alumnus/a|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 Texas Southern University|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.
''Hopwood v. Texas'' (1996)
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 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).[Burka, Paul. "Law - Cheryl Hopwood." ''Texas Monthly'' (Sept. 1996)]
The case of ''Hopwood v. Texas'' (1996) was the first successful legal challenge to affirmative action in student admissions since ''Regents of the University of California v. Bakke'' (1978) ruled quotas were unconstitutional. The 5th Circuit 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."[Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996)]
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''.[See Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (stating that the Supreme Court's purpose in deciding Grutter's case was "to resolve the disagreement among the Courts of Appeals on a question of national importance: Whether diversity is a compelling interest that can justify the narrowly tailored use of race in selecting applicants for admission to public universities. Compare Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (CA5 1996) (holding that diversity is not a compelling state interest) with case holding that it is."]
Alumni
- William R. Archer - United States Representative from Texas (1971-2001)
- James Baker — former United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State
- Paul Begala — political consulting|political consultant, Pundit (expert)|commentator and former advisor to President of the United States|President Bill Clinton
- Lloyd Bentsen — former United States Secretary of the Treasury|Secretary of the Treasury and United States Senator
- Samuel T. Bledsoe — President of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway 1933-1939.
- William Curtis Bryson|William C. Bryson — United States Circuit Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit|United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
- George P. Bush — son of Governor of Florida|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 Connally|John B. Connally, Jr. — former Governor of Texas, former United States Secretary of the Navy|Secretary of the Navy, former United States Secretary of the Treasury|Secretary of the Treasury
- Tom Connally — former United States Senator from Texas
- William C. Conner (1920-2009), federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.[Martin, Douglas. "William Conner, Judge Expert in Patent Law, Dies at 89", ''The New York Times'', July 19, 2009. Accessed July 20, 2009.]
- Dick DeGuerin — prominent criminal defense attorney based in Houston, TX
- Lloyd Doggett — member, U.S. Congress
- David Frederick — successful appellate attorney; has argued over 21 cases before the United States Supreme Court
- Orlando Luis Garcia, United States District Judge, Western District of Texas
- Bryan Garner — editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary
- Mike Godwin — first attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and current general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation
- Leon A. Green — long-time dean (education)|dean at Northwestern University School of Law and professor at UT and at Yale Law School; authored pioneering works in tort law
- Timothy Hall — current President of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, former law professor at The University of Mississippi.
- Hayden W. Head, Jr. — Chief Judge, United States District Court, Southern District of Texas
- Scott Horton (lawyer)|Robert Scott Horton — prominent Human Rights attorney, columnist for Harper's, and adjunct professor at Columbia Law School
- Herbert Hovenkamp, Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law; prolific author and expert in Antitrust law; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Kay Bailey Hutchison — Senior Senator|senior United States Senate|United States Senator from Texas
- Joe Jamail — billionaire litigator and philanthropist
- Andrew L. Jefferson, Jr. — noted Houston lawyer, former Harris County judge, former federal prosecutor and former federal judicial nominee
- Edith Jones — Chief Justice of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
- Chris Jordan — environmental photographer
- William Wayne Justice — Senior United States District Judge, Western District of Texas, United States District Judge, Eastern District of Texas, storied civil rights judge
- W. Page Keeton — 1931 graduate and Dean from 1949 to 1974; expert in Torts
- Ron Kirk — former list of mayors of Dallas, Texas|mayor of Dallas, Texas
- Earle Bradford Mayfield — former United States Senator from 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 Nichol — law professor at the University of North Carolina; former professor and President of the College of William and Mary; former dean of the law schools at University of North Carolina School of Law|North Carolina and University of Colorado School of Law|Colorado.
- Federico Peña — former United States Secretary of Transportation|Secretary of Transportation and United States Secretary of Energy|Secretary of Energy
- Robert Schwarz Strauss — former list of United States Ambassadors to Russia|United States Ambassador to Russia
- Kristen Silverberg — Ambassadors of the United States|U.S. Ambassador to the European Union
- Morris Sheppard — former United States Senator from Texas
- Ray Thornton — former United States Representative from Arkansas and Arkansas Supreme Court justice
- Sarah Weddington — represented Norma McCorvey|Jane Roe in the landmark Supreme Court case ''Roe v. Wade''
- Harry Whittington — Texas Lawyer|attorney who was notable for getting shot by Dick Cheney in a hunting incident; professionally known for eminent domain cases.
- Diane Pamela Wood — Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, considered potential candidate for a Barack Obama Supreme Court candidates|seat on the Supreme Court during the Obama administration.
- Ralph Yarborough — former United States Senator from Texas
- John Andrew Young — former United States Representative from Texas
- Paul Davis — retired Texas state Judge
- Notable rejections include President George W. Bush, who was denied admission in the fall of 1970.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2000/bush/cron.html
References
External links
- The University of Texas School of Law
Category:Educational institutions established in 1883
Category:Law schools in Texas
Category:University of Texas at Austin schools, colleges, and departments|School of LawRelated Images
Sources: StartLearningNow, Wikipedia | Usage license: GNU FDL
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