UC Berkeley School of Law

The UC Berkeley School of Law, commonly referred to as Boalt Hall, is one of 14 schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley.

Boalt Hall is consistently regarded both as one of the top 10 law schools and one of the top public law schools in the country. The 2007 U.S. News & World Report ranked Boalt Hall eighth overall among all law schools in the country. It was also tied with two other public law schools for the distinction of top public law school.[1] Boalt Hall is renowned for its strong intellectual property program, which has held the top spot in U.S. News and World Report rankings for several years running. [2]

History

The Department of Jurisprudence was founded at Berkeley in 1894. In 1912, the department was elevated to the School of Jurisprudence, which was then renamed the School of Law in 1950.

The School was originally located in Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, built in 1911 with funds largely from Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt donated in memory of her late husband, John Henry Boalt. In 1951, the School moved to its current location in the new Boalt Hall, at the southeast corner of the central campus, and the old Boalt Hall was renamed Durant Hall.

In 2001, Dean of the Law School John Dwyer left amid a scandal concerning a 3L student, who claimed he had made inappropriate sexual advances on her during her 1L year.

Academics

A view of San Francisco and the Bay from Boalt Hall.

Boalt Hall has approximately 850 J.D. students, 30 students in the LL.M. and J.S.D. programs, and 10 students in the Ph.D. program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. The School also features specialized curricular programs in Business, Law and Economics, Comparative Legal Studies, Environmental Law, International Legal Studies, Law and Technology, and Social Justice.

The JD program's admissions process is highly selective. Boalt Hall is known to value high undergraduate GPAs, perhaps even more than high LSAT scores (whereas the opposite is considered the norm at other top law schools). According to U.S. News and World Report, Boalt has the third-lowest acceptance rate among American law schools; approximately 10% of applicants are admitted.

Boalt's grading system for the JD program is unusual among law schools. Students are graded on a High Honors (HH), Honors (H), and Pass (P) scale. Approximately 60% of the students in each class receive a grade of Pass, 30% receive a grade of Honors, and the highest 10% receive a grade of High Honors; lower grades of Substandard Pass (or Pass Conditional, abbreviated PC) and No Credit (NC) may be awarded at the discretion of professors. When calculating grade-point averages (GPAs), which determine admission to the Order of the Coif and class ranks, a Pass grade is worth 2 points, an Honors grade is worth 3 points, and a High Honors grade is worth 5 points. (Boalt makes class ranks available to JD students only for the purpose of applying to judicial clerkships and academic positions.)

For a typical class in the JD program, the average age of admitted students is 24 years old, over a range of ages from 20 to 48 years old. Approximately 88% of JD students receive financial aid. As state institutions, Boalt and UCLA had the lowest tuition of the top 15 law schools in the country in 2005. The tuition for the 2006-07 school year is $25,380.00 for California residents ($37,625.00 for nonresidents), though the sum has been rising each year.

Boalt Hall in Popular Culture

Sandy Cohen, a character on the popular television series The O.C., is a lawyer and a Boalt Hall alumnus.

The O.C. at Boalt is a student group that, in addition to screening episodes of The O.C. during the lunch period, offers the Sandy Cohen Fellowship, a summer grant for students who plan to work as public defenders (on The O.C., Sandy Cohen worked as a public defender before moving to Orange County). In recent years, The O.C. at Boalt has also managed to bring Peter Gallagher, the actor who plays Sandy Cohen, to Boalt to speak on an annual basis.

Matthew Perry played a Republican graduate of Boalt Hall on an episode of The West Wing.

Centers at Boalt Hall

Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and the Economy (est. 2004)
Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (est. 1996)
California Center for Environmental Law and Policy
Center for Clinical Education (est. 1998)
Center for Social Justice (est. 1999)
Center for the Study of Law and Society (est. 1961)
Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity
Death Penalty Clinic (est. 2001)
Institute for Legal Research (formerly the Earl Warren Legal Institute) (est. 1963)
International Human Rights Law Clinic (est. 1998)
Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs (est. 2000)
Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance (est. 1994)
Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic (est. 2000)

Law Journals at Boalt Hall

Asian American Law Journal
Berkeley Business Law Journal
Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy
Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law
Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice
Berkeley Journal of International Law
Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
Berkeley Technology Law Journal
Boalt Journal of Criminal Law
California Law Review
Ecology Law Quarterly

List of noted alumni

Earl Warren, 1914 - Governor of California, Chief Justice of the United States
Walter Gordon, 1922 - Governor of the Virgin Islands, judge, member of National Football Foundation Hall of Fame
Roger J. Traynor, 1927 - Chief Justice, California Supreme Court, 1964-1970
Melvin Belli, 1929 - attorney
G. William Miller, 1952 - U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Edwin Meese III, 1958 - U.S. Attorney General
Pete Wilson, 1962 - U.S. Senator, Governor of California
Theodore Olson, 1965 - U.S. Solicitor General
Neil Goldschmidt, 1967 - U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Governor of Oregon
David B. Frohnmeyer, 1967 - Oregon Attorney General, University of Oregon President
Leigh Steinberg, 1973 - sports agent
Barry Scheck, 1974 - Co-founder of the Innocence Project
Lance Ito, 1975 - judge, presided over O. J. Simpson criminal trial
Brian Liddicoat, 1996 - attorney
Katharine Bartlett, 1975 - dean of Duke University School of Law
Christopher Schroeder, 1974 - professor at Duke University School of Law
Catherine Fisk, 1986 - professor at Duke University School of Law
Larry W. Sonsini
Charles A. Miller
Cruz Reynoso, 1958 - Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, 1982-1987

List of noted faculty

Christopher Edley, Jr. – Dean of the School of Law (2004-), co-founder of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University
Melvin A. Eisenberg – author of a leading Contracts casebook and chief reporter for the Principles of Corporate Governance, issued by the American Law Institute.
William A. Fletcher – Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Ian F. Haney Lopez – influential critical race theorist, author of White By Law
Angela P. Harris – leading scholar in feminist legal theory and critical race theory
Michael Heyman – Chancellor of the Berkeley campus (1980 to 1990), Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1994 to 1999)
Phillip E. Johnson – One of the fathers of intelligent design.
Herma Hill Kay – Former Dean of the School of Law (1992-2000), instrumental in the battle for no-fault divorce in California
Paul J. Mishkin – former author of the popular casebook on Federal Courts, Hart and Wechsler's The Federal Courts and the Federal System.
William L. Prosser – Former Dean of the School of Law (1948-1961), author of several well-known treatises and pioneer in the field of strict products liability.
John T. Noonan, Jr. – Senior Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
John Yoo – Co-Author of the USA PATRIOT Act. Famous for arguing that torture, even torture of children, is legal if authorized by the president.

External links

Boalt Hall's Official Site
boalt.org - Website for student groups and journals