Reduced Tuition For University Law Students

NY Times

Costs are rising rapidly throughout the University of California system, but its newest law school, at Irvine, announced this week that the 80 students chosen for the second entering class will get privately financed scholarships covering at least half their tuition for all three years.

Irvine’s inaugural class of 60 students, who arrived in August, received full scholarships for all three years — a deal that helped Irvine attract so much interest that it accepted only 4 percent of its applicants, making it the most selective law school in the nation in its very first year.

“Obviously we can’t keep these scholarships going forever,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, “but I think we need to keep it going till we’re established as a school, so that we keep getting these high-quality applicants.” The law school is not yet accredited.

Most of the scholarship money, Mr. Chemerinsky said, comes from Southern California lawyers. Just last week, Mark Robinson, an Orange County trial lawyer who had donated $1 million for the inaugural class, made an additional $400,000 contribution.

Tuition for the 2010-11 year is expected to be about $40,000 for California residents and about $50,000 for out-of-state students, an increase of more than 10 percent from this year.

Mr. Chemerinsky, who formerly taught at Duke University law school, said that the quality of this year’s applicants was at least as strong as last year’s — and that with this week’s scholarship announcement, he expected a surge of new applications before the Feb. 15 deadline.

“One recruiting advantage we have this year is that we have these great students here now,” he said.

Mr. Chemerinsky got off to a rocky start at Irvine. He was hired to be the dean in September 2007 — and fired a week later amid complaints about his outspoken liberal views. That reversal sparked further protests, and several days later, the chancellor, Michael V. Drake, flew to North Carolina, and rehired him.

“There’s been no problem since then,” Mr. Chemerinsky said. “The chancellor and I co-taught a freshman seminar, and he could not be more personally supportive of me, or institutionally supportive of the law school.”