University of Texas School of Law

Infobox Law School
name=The University of Texas
School of Law


established=1883
type=Public
head=Lawrence Sager
city=Austin
state=Texas
country=USA
students=1,484
faculty=
ranking=16
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. [cite web|url = http://www.utexas.edu/law/about/history.html | title = History of the Law School | work=The University of Texas School of Law | accessdate = 9 April | accessyear = 2006]

The law school is consistently ranked among the top twenty law schools in the nation and has a reputation for turning out high-profile lawyers and public servants. The school is currently ranked #16 in the nation by "U.S. News & World Report". [ [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/law/search Search - Law - Best Graduate Schools - Education - US News and World Report ] ]

The law school had its racially-based admission policies struck down by courts on two separate occasions, but the policies were reinstated after Grutter v. Bollinger.

History

Founded in 1883.

"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.

"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 Hopwood 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".

Notable alumni

*William R. Archer - United States Representative from Texas (1971-2001)
*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 and United States Senator
*Samuel T. Bledsoe — President of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway 1933-1939. [cite book| title=Steel Trails to Santa Fe| author=Waters, Lawrence Leslie| publisher=University of Kansas Press| location=Lawrence, Kansas| year=1950| pages=p 421| ]
*William C. Bryson — United States Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
*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
*Robert R. Crane — United States District Judge, Southern District of Texas, McAllen
*Dick DeGuerin — prominent criminal defense attorney based in Houston, TX
*Mike Godwin — first attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and current general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation
*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
* Timothy Hall — current President of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, former law professor at The University of Mississippi.
*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
*Sam Hurt, creator of the Eyebeam comic strip.
*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
*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
*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 — 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 North Carolina and Colorado.
*Federico Peña — former Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Energy
*Robert Schwarz Strauss — former United States Ambassador to Russia
*Ray Thornton — former United States Representative from Arkansas and Arkansas Supreme Court justice
*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.
*Ralph Yarborough — former United States Senator from Texas
*John Andrew Young — former United States Representative from Texas
* Notable rejections include current 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

* [http://www.utexas.edu/law/ The University of Texas School of Law]