Mass. welcomes its first public law school: officials launch national student recruiting drive, citing diversity as top goal.(noteworthy news)(University of Massachusetts School of Law at Dartmouth)

Diverse Issues in Higher Education April 1, 2010 | Cooper, Kenneth J. site mitt romney news

A temporary white tarpaulin sign, stretched outside a single two-story building, announces the creation of the first public law school in Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts School of Law at Dartmouth.

The sign drapes over that of the former Southern New England School of Law, a small private school that gave over its more than $20 million in assets to merge with UMass Dartmouth. The merger, endorsed by Gov. Deval Patrick and approved by the state Board of Higher Education in February, ended a long battle to create a public law school in the state. In 2005, a similar plan had been rejected under Gov. Mitt Romney.

News of the historic change reached a wide audience, with aspiring lawyers across the state and country submitting 97 applications the same month the merger was approved. The former school received 23 applicants in February 2009, according to Dean Robert V. Ward Jr.

The UMass Dartmouth Law School was created to build on the diversity of Southern New England’s campus, where 34 percent of 235 students are minority, the highest level of the state’s eight law schools.

Each of the 8,000 minorities who took the LSAT in February was sent information about UMass Dartmouth Law. In addition, administrators plan to work through existing contacts at historically Black colleges.

“For us and the university, minority enrollment is important. It’s the first thing we wanted to do” in a national recruiting drive, Ward says.

Chancellor Jean MacCormack says the law school will strive for diversity, not just for race and ethnicity, but also for older, nontraditional or working-class students. “I’m the first in my family to go to college. My dad was a mechanic. My mother was a waitress,” says the former longtime administrator at UMass Boston.

The school’s geographical distance from large minority populations, however, will require officials to “work really hard to attract diverse students to campus,” says MacCormack. The law school will remain at its current site, three miles from the main campus in southeastern Massachusetts near the Rhode Island border. The economically struggling region is overwhelmingly White and not the most obvious location for a diverse law school, though the area has pockets of African-American, Cape Verdean and Guatemalan populations.

“I think we’ll be attractive from all across the state,” MacCormack says. “But we’re going to put special effort into pre-law programs at colleges and universities that are close to the urban centers” of Boston, Springfield and Worcester.

Affordability will be one attraction for students. In-state tuition will be $23,500, significantly lower than the $38,000 or more that other Massachusetts law schools charge. Out-of-state students will pay $31,200.

About a quarter of students are to receive a 50 percent discount in exchange for committing to practice public interest law in Massachusetts’ underserved areas for five years after graduation. “Wherever you have significant pockets of poverty, you’ll have unmet legal needs,” says Ward. go to web site mitt romney news

A 2008 Boston Bar Association study found 90 percent of individuals who appeared in the state’s housing, probate or family courts did not have legal representation. Most of the 1 million low-income residents eligible for free legal aid in civil matters did not get it because of the dearth of available lawyers.

In addition, the state’s bar is less diverse than its population, which is about 9 percent Hispanic and 7 percent African-American, according to 2008 Census Bureau data. Only 3.5 percent of the state’s lawyers are either African-American or Hispanic.

Dr. Richard Freeland, the state commissioner of higher education, said the UMass system had been trying to create a law school at least since 1970. But justifying the need for one has been a hard case to make in a state that houses notable law schools at Harvard, Boston and Northeastern universities.

“Public higher education has always labored in the shadow of private institutions,” he says.

In recent years, however, the strongest opposition came from three lesser-known law schools in the state: New England, Western New England and Suffolk University. Lacking the prominence of the state’s other private law schools, they feared a growing, state-supported competitor would place them at a disadvantage by offering lower tuition and siphoning off potential students.

Massachusetts is the 45th state to have a public law school. Freeland says it was a “huge missing piece” in the state university system and will provide Massachusetts residents with educational opportunities comparable to what other states offer.

The school will also be “importing talent” from other states in hopes that some nonresidents will set up practice in Massachusetts after they graduate, says Freeland.

“I’m confident this is going to take off and be a real asset to the state,” he says.

To solidify its national appeal, the challenge for the law school is to win accreditation from the American Bar Association. Southern New England, founded in 1983, had been awarding law degrees for two decades with authorization from the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education. Since 1995, the school has also been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

ABA accreditation would allow graduates to take the bar exam in every state; currently, they can in Massachusetts and Connecticut only.

Cooper, Kenneth J.