Posts Tagged ‘UC – Irvine’

A proposed partnership with the University of California could pipeline local students to their brand-new innovative law school and increase the chances that graduates move here to practice law.

Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and District Court of Guam Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood said they were both excited about forming a partnership that could benefit students on either side of the Pacific.

“Nothing has been thought through or decided so I’m just suggesting possibilities,” Chemerinsky said yesterday. “Guam doesn’t have a law school itself, but we could create a program to admit students from Guam to our law school.”

Tydingco-Gatewood said the University of California could allow its students to earn credits by working at the District Court of Guam.

Students who worked in Guam for a semester would be more likely to return here after they graduated, she said.

Chemerinsky was the keynote speaker at the District Court of Guam Annual District Conference yesterday. About two hundred members of Guam’s legal community packed into a ballroom to hear him speak.

[Guam PDN]

EVENT: A luncheon debate over the future of the U.S. Supreme Court between Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and Dean Kenneth Starr of Pepperdine University School of Law is the culmination of a two-day conference, “Courtroom Solutions for Today`s Lawyers.” Some of California`s premier judges, attorneys and legal scholars will address new challenges in modern courtroom practice during the conference, which is sponsored by Orange County Trial Lawyers Association, American Board of Trial Advocates, and UCI School of Law.

WHEN: Saturday, noon, Oct. 24, 2009. (The conference starts Friday, Oct. 23 at 6:00 a.m.)

WHERE: UC Irvine Student Center. For directions, www.uci.edu/campus_maps.php

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS: Justice Ming Chin of the California Supreme Court is the keynote speaker at the 8:15 a.m. Saturday breakfast.Howard Miller, president of the State Bar of California for 2010, is the keynote speaker at the Friday noon luncheon.A number of other prominent California judges, lawyers and academics will also speak at the conference on a variety of topics, including business litigation, ethics, juror perspectives, and judicial viewpoints.

[Reuters]

September 17, 1787, is the day 35 revolutionary men signed the U.S. Constitution, a historical text that many Americans today take for granted. In honor of the Constitution and in the hopes that students will take notice of the document that this country is built upon, Cal State Fullerton holds an annual Constitution week. Within this week, political scientists, journalists and elected officials give discussions on topics all related to constitutional law, some specifically addressing California.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the new UCI Law School, gave a lecture Monday on the issue of the Robert’s Court, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the future of constitutional law. Chemerinsky received his B.S. from Northwestern University, has written 6 books and over 100 law reviews, and has argued numerous appellate cases including in the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Chemerinsky’s lecture was clear and intellectually stimulating. Although I am aware of the Robert’s Courts actions, I hadn’t thought about it on those terms. It all seemed to be a wake-up call,” Scott Spitzer, assistant professor of political science said.

The way in which Chemerinsky laid before his audience the Robert’s Court and the future of the constitution was intriguing and somewhat raw.

“Don’t think about it in legal abstractions but about how it affects people. How it affects you,” Chemerinsky said, regarding the Supreme Court and the Constitution.

[Daily Titan]

In a challenging fundraising climate, the first new public law school in California in more than a generation begins classes Monday at UC Irvine with 61 top-flight students, a highly regarded faculty and the goal of becoming a model for an innovative legal education emphasizing hands-on experience and public service.

It has been less than two years since the school’s founding dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, was hired, fired and rehired by UCI Chancellor Michael Drake during a weeklong fiasco that focused attention on Chemerinsky’s outspoken liberal politics and whether conservative critics had quietly lobbied for his ouster. The resulting national uproar over the sanctity of academic freedom threatened to derail the law school.

Today, the episode seems relegated to the distant past as the school receives high marks even before its doors open. It also fulfills a decades-long dream of Orange County’s legal and business leaders — notably Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren, a major donor — for a public law school at UCI.

Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor and author of an influential blog on legal education, said that, based on the quality of its faculty and the entrance exam scores of its first class, UCI should be ranked among the nation’s top 20 law schools, status that typically takes a new school decades to achieve.

[LA Times]

WHO: UCI School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will deliver short opening remarks, as will Mark P. Robinson Jr., chair of the Dean’s Advisory Council and the senior partner with Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson in Newport Beach, Calif. Cutting the ribbon will be the first student to commit to attending the law school, Acrivi Coromelas, a San Gabriel, Calif., high school English teacher and graduate of Grinnell College and Claremont Graduate University.

WHAT: The founding of UC Irvine School of Law marks the first new public law school in California in more than 40 years.

WHEN: The ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held at 8:00 a.m. PDT on Monday, Aug. 24, outside the law school entrance. At 8:30 a.m., first classes for the 63 members of the inaugural class begin.

WHERE: UCI School of Law, 401 East Peltason Drive, Irvine, CA (corner of Campus Drive and East Peltason). For parking, show identification at the parking kiosk in front of the law school on East Peltason Drive, or at the entrance of the Social Sciences Parking Structure at Campus Drive and Stanford Avenue, one block west of East Peltason. Directions: http://www.law.uci.edu/directions.html

WHY: From the outset, the School of Law has been envisioned as a necessary addition to help make UC Irvine, founded in 1965, a full-service research university.

[Business Wire]

Twin concrete buildings stand in the blazing Orange County sun at the corner of Campus and East Peltason drives. A white steel staircase zigzags between their four levels, lacing the structures together. They blend in with the modern architectural style of Southern California—functional, but hardly impressive.

A dark gray Toyota Prius—California li­cense plate UCI Law 1—is parked out front. The windshield has a small, star-shaped crack on the passenger side that’s been there for some time. The gray, cloth interior could use a good detailing. The owner has had bigger things on his mind.

Erwin Chemerinsky—the sometime U.S. Supreme Court advocate and nation’s most-cited full-time legal academic—is eager to talk about his “next big thing”: an attempt to create the first top-tier American law school to be founded in more than 50 years. As if that weren’t an audacious enough goal, it’s designed to be among the most innovative law schools in the nation.

[ABA Journal]

UC Irvine School of Law has established a Korea Law Center to promote practical solutions to problems arising at the intersection of U.S. and Korean law.

The center, part of a new, multi-continent UC Irvine International Commerce & Law Institute, will provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, legal scholars, judges, lawyers and business people from South Korea and the United States to learn and work together here and in Korea.

“We intend our Korea Law Center to be the first of several international branches of our UC Irvine International Commerce & Law Institute, the goal of which is to foster international cooperation among the business, legal and educational communities on several continents — so far, Europe, North America and Asia,” said UCI School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Partnerships with the University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain, and law schools and lawyers in China are also in the works, Chemerinsky said. “No other American law school has a business and law institute with a comparable international reach,” he said.

[PR Newswire]