S.J. Quinney College of Law

History - The First 100 Years

Legal education in Utah, while long desired, was not achieved beyond a handful of law courses beginning in 1869, until 1883 when University President John Park created a series of law lectures, designed to turn the series into a fully established law department at the University of Deseret. The lecture series, headed by Joseph Rawlins, continued for 8 years, against significant odds, until 1907 when Joseph Kingsbury as president designated a Department of Law.

The law department was now a reality, without a home. Classes were held at the Salt Lake City and County building, which also served as the state capitol, courthouse and government offices for the city and county. The department became a school in the spring of 1912 when the Board of Regents approved a plan to add a third year to the existing two-year law program. The University of Utah (the name Deseret was dropped in 1892) had a “School of Law.” Registration was $12 and tuition cost $15 per year for one law subject, $30 for two and $40 for three or more. The first commencement was held in June, 1913 awarding degress to eight men, all from Utah.

The new law school had impressive leadership. The first Dean was Frank Holman, a 27 year old with an undergraduate degree from the U as well as a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford where he had been a Rhodes Scolar. He was a member of the Utah Bar, had his own practice and would later serve as president of the American Bar Association. He earned a massive $2,000 annully, the equivalent of $51,326.70 in 2015.

The School of Law now had a leader, 75 students, and an emerging reputation throughout the Intermountain West. What it still didn’t have was a home. Classes continued to be held in borrowed space at the City and County Building, leaving the law students largely isolated from campus life. That changed with the completion of the Administration Building (today’s Park Building) in October 1914. The law school took up residence on the third floor, and with $1,500 from the Regents, began assembling a law library.

In 1915, William Leary took over as dean and would remain in that role for 35 years, leaving an indelible imprint on the College of Law. Leary earned his J.D. from the Chicago Law School, which served as a primary role model in the formation and evolution of Utah’s law school. Armed with a total budget of $7,000, Leary immediately began pushing for more full-time faculty. But in the spring of the next year, the law school was decimated by a one-two punch. First came war. When the U.S. entered World War I in April of 1918, it pulled students and faculty alike into the fray. By the time commencement rolled around the next spring, the law school conferred degrees to just three graduates.

Next came an epidemic of Spanish Influenza. The disease killed 20 million people worldwide in 1918. A third of all deaths in Utah in 1918-19 were from influenza and its frequent complication, pneumonia. For a while, it closed the university. As the Deseret News reported on Oct. 10, 1918, “All collegiate study has been suspended at the University of Utah for the period of the influenza epidemic on the order of President John A. Widstoe.” The law school itself was on the verge of shutting down the second- and third-year courses. The armistice came along just in time, putting an end to war on November 11, 1918. On top of that, the influenza epidemic was largely contained by the next spring, and within two years, the law school had come back in force, doubling its pre-war enrollment.

Rebecca Garelick was admitted in 1921 and became the first female graduate in 1924, earning admission to the Utah bar that same year. While Garelick had cleared a major hurdle, progress for women would remain slow. By the end of the 1920s, just three women had graduated from the school. The fourth, Reva Bosone, was a true pioneer. She graduated in 1930 and went on to become the first woman elected to the bench in Utah, and in 1948 became the first woman from Utah to be elected to Congress. Another woman, Marion Gould, signaled a major milestone for the law school: she was hired—at $200 per month—as the school’s first full-time librarian in 1939. The law school was in fine form as it emerged from the Great Depression.

Then war came to campus once again, erupting in dramatic fashion with the morning raid on Pearl Harbor. Donald Zillman, a former U law professor who has written extensively about the law school, put it this way: “By Monday, December 8, 1941, virtually the entire school knew that military service would be in their immediate future.” Students flooded military recruitment offices, and the law school again found itself on the brink of closure. By 1944, there were just 25 students in the school. When the war ended in 1945, returning veterans rushed into school the same way they had rushed out. And they had money, thanks to the G.I. Bill signed into law in 1944. The influx changed the tenor of the law school. Prior to the war, the typical law student prior to the war was in his early 20s, single, and likely to be from Utah or a bordering state. The veterans who came back from war were in their late 20s or early 30s, sometimes with families. The veterans instantly created an older, more mature student body within the law school.

All of this occurred while still without a permanent home for the law school. Complaints about the Park building included noise, poor lighting and ventilation and lack of space. Now with so many students the problems were magnified. In 1957 the American Bar Association left a withering review in its accreditation inspection: “Unless adequate plant facilities be provided within the next five years, it is the intention of the Council to recommend to the House of Delegates that the school be dropped from the approved list.” The specter of losing accreditation caught the eye of University administration and the state legislature. Plans circulated to remodel Carlson Hall, originally built as a women’s dormitory. But President A. Ray Olpin was convinced that a new law building should be a priority. The 1961 legislature appropriated $1 million for the new building. Groundbreaking took place in the summer of 1962, and a year later, the College of Law had a 65,000-square-foot building to call its own.

In 2001 another accreditation report took aim at the College’s physical facilities. While the College had long maintained a national reputation for quality, the building itself had been at capacity almost from the day it opened. Complaints began to echo those that had prompted a move out of the Park Building. Changing technologies, new methods for legal education, and another difficult accreditation report in 2009 underscored the need for a better facility. Hiram Chodosh, who took over as dean in 2006, spearheaded the effort. “We are building a teaching hospital for law,” Chodosh said in a Salt Lake Tribune interview. “We are building clinical and practical training into our program, as well as the ethos of service in each and every student.”

The 155,000-square-foot building now houses centers in Criminal Justice, Law and Biomedical Sciences, and Innovation in Legal Education as well as the existing Stegner Center. It encourages collaboration between students and faculty, and allows more opportunities to further the emphasis on public service.

One hundred years are in the books. What started in borrowed office space on the valley floor will enter a second century housed in a contemporary monument to intelligent design. The original graduating class of eight local men has evolved into 2012’s class of 136 graduates—almost equally divided between men and women—representing 35 states and countries. A century of progress begets a new century of promise. It starts now.

New Law School Building

On Oct. 30, 2009, Former Dean Hiram Chodosh announced to students, during his monthly "Dean's Report and Reception," that the University of Utah was moving forward on plans to construct a new law school facility in the near future. He and other faculty members formed a committee and began discussions with University administration in order to get the project off the ground and to seek funding. Dean Chodosh also reported that he was interviewing architects for the project, and that the committee had already decided on an ideal square footage and interior design for the building.

During the spring 2010 "Dean Update" Dean Chodosh updated the students on the new law school building. He announced that ground would be broken in 2013, that fundraising/lobbying was underway, and the site of the new school would be directly east of the former law school complex. The advantages of staying near the old site included the following: close proximity to Trax, within the historic and arguably most beautiful area of campus, and with the completion of the "Universe" retail/commercial/high density residential development - to be built directly west of the football stadium - the new law school would be in the heart of one of the most exciting areas on campus.

The new $62.5 million law building was opened on September 1, 2015, is LEED Platinum certified and includes a cafe, secured-access student study areas, a furnished and landscaped roof-top terrace with wifi access, and a 450-person moot courtroom with picture windows looking to the south over the roof-top terrace and the Salt Lake valley.

Some other building features are the following:

Campus

The law school building is located in the south-west corner of campus directly north of the stadium light rail station and Rice-Eccles Stadium, home of the two-time BCS bowl champion Utah Utes football team.

Law library

The James E. Faust Law Library (formerly the S.J. Quinney Law Library) is completely integrated into the new law school building. It houses law and law-related material and serves as a selective depository for US government documents. The first two floors of the building are open to the public; materials located on upper floors or off-site storage can be retrieved for public patrons. JD Librarians teach the research component of the Legal Methods course in the first year.

Reputation

According to the widely cited USNWR 2018 Law School Rankings, the S.J. Quinney College of Law was named a "Top Tier" Law School and is currently ranked #44 out of more than 205 law schools in the United States, making it the top ranked law school in Utah. It is also ranked #7 in Environmental Law. Several University of Utah law students have been chosen for prestigious internships and clerkships, including four graduates who have served as clerks to Supreme Court Justices. Tyler R. Green, a 2005 graduate of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas during the October 2009 term. Utah has the 3rd lowest student to faculty ratio at 7.3:1, behind only Yale and Stanford at 7.3:1 and 8:1, respectively.

Admissions, and bar passage

There were 1277 applicants for the incoming class of 2012 at the S.J. Quinney College of Law and 128 students were enrolled; the incoming class had a median LSAT score of 160 and median GPA of 3.60. The 25th-75th percentile LSAT range was 156-163, and the 25th-75th percentile range for GPA was 3.41-3.76.

The overall bar passage rate in 2009 was about 85.5%, with 75% passing in February and 90% passing in July.

Costs

The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) at S.J. Quinney School of Law for the 2017-2018 academic year is $26,758 for residents and $50,816 for nonresidents.

Dean Robert Adler

Beginning in July 2014, Professor Adler became the 11th Dean of the S.J. Quinney College of Law, now as the Jefferson B. and Rita E. Fordham Presidential Dean, after serving as Interim Dean since July 2013. Dean Adler oversaw the construction of the College of Law's new law school building and is pursuing the Building Justice capital campaign to help ensure that we can continue to provide a superb legal education for our students at an affordable cost. He is also dedicated to continuing the College's recent history of curricular reform-particularly in ways that improve real world learning opportunities and skills training for its students-to meet the needs of the next generation of lawyers.

Organizations

Campus organizations in alphabetical order include:

Scholarly publications

The S.J. Quinney College of Law currently publishes three legal journals: