UCI law school plan is celebrated

UC IRVINE — Less than a month after the UC Regents gave them approval to open a law school on campus, UCI administrators gathered at the Bren Events Center on Thursday evening to officially celebrate their hard-won victory.

During a half-hour ceremony in a tent outside the Bren center, Chancellor Michael Drake, Executive Vice Chancellor Michael Gottfredson and others addressed a crowd of hundreds of UCI faculty members, attorneys and members of the business community.

Drake, who came on board as chancellor last year, said opening a law school fulfills a dream that UCI carried since its inception four decades ago.

“It’s going to be such a major contribution to education, to legal scholarship on our campus, but also across Orange County and Southern California,” Drake said.

The festivities followed an hour-long reception inside the center, where the invitation-only crowd mingled and enjoyed refreshments. Mark Robinson, Jr., a managing partner for the firm Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson, delivered the opening remarks outside.

“Daniel Webster said justice is the greatest concern of man on earth,” Robinson said. “There is no greater calling than to stand as a lawyer at the bar of justice.”

Gottfredson, also UCI’s provost, stressed the community aspect of UCI’s law school in his remarks, noting that instructors hoped to prepare students for public-sector careers with underserved populations.

“This is a great day for UCI, not just because we’re going to have a law school, but because of the kind of law school we’re going to have,” he said.

On Nov. 16, the Regents approved UCI’s proposal for a 600-student law school that would collaborate with a number of other schools on campus. The school, expected to open in 2009, will be the first public law school to open in California since UC Davis founded one in 1965 — the same year that UCI opened.

During the last two decades, UCI had taken official steps to try to open a law school, but frequently ran afoul of budget issues. The university started a task force in 1989 and tried unsuccessfully to float a proposal over the next decade as the state’s economy floundered. A second proposal made it to the Regents’ office in 2001, but also fell short due to money issues.