UC Berkeley School of Law

Based on Wikipedia: UC Berkeley School of Law

The Fraternity That Reshaped a Law School

Here's a peculiar architectural mystery: Why does one of America's most prestigious law schools have a building that looks strangely bland from certain angles, as if someone designed it facing the wrong direction?

The answer, according to campus legend, involves a fraternity house that refused to budge.

In the early 1950s, as the University of California, Berkeley was constructing its new law school building, the Zeta Psi fraternity allegedly had enough political clout with the university's board of regents to keep their house exactly where it stood—right in the path of the original plans. The story goes that architects had to rotate the entire building counterclockwise at the last minute, leaving the law school facing an awkward direction with large blank walls where grand facades should have been.

It's a wonderful tale. It may also be mostly untrue.

University archivist William Benemann discovered in 2010 that the building's architect, Warren Perry, had drawings from as early as 1945 showing the building in its current orientation. The fraternity house was always there, and Perry simply designed around it. Those large blank walls weren't a hasty fix—they were the plan all along. The faculty even asked Perry to remove the large windows he'd designed for the lecture halls, worried that the stunning view of San Francisco Bay would distract students from their studies.

But here's the irony: just five years after forcing the university to accommodate them, Zeta Psi traded that prime location for a larger building across the street. Their old fraternity house still stands today, quietly housing the Archaeological Research Facility.

One Professor, Four Subjects, Three Years

The institution now known as Berkeley Law began in 1894 with a single professor teaching every course.

William Carey Jones was his name, and for three years he personally taught all four subjects that constituted the Department of Jurisprudence: Constitutional Law, International Law, Roman Law, and Jurisprudence itself. The department had been carved out of the Department of History and Political Science, and Jones—who had taught a Roman law course to Berkeley seniors back in 1882—had a particular vision for it.

He didn't want to create another vocational training ground for lawyers.

San Francisco already had Hastings College of the Law for that. Jones imagined something more academic, a place to broaden undergraduates' understanding of legal theory without necessarily preparing them to argue cases. Students who wanted to actually practice law were simply referred to Hastings, where their Berkeley coursework could count toward a law degree.

This arrangement lasted until 1901, when the department hired five additional instructors. By 1902, with four more lecturers on board, Berkeley could offer a complete three-year law program. The referrals to Hastings stopped.

San Francisco and Oakland newspapers announced the news: Berkeley now had a "complete law school," and its graduates could apply directly to the California bar.

A Tale of Two Law Schools

What happened next became a case study in institutional competition.

Both Berkeley and Hastings had started with similar resources—one full-time professor supplemented by practicing lawyers who taught part-time. But Berkeley made a crucial choice: it rapidly hired enough full-time faculty to teach most of its courses, then tightened admission standards for both students and professors.

Hastings did not.

The result was dramatic. Berkeley quickly eclipsed the older law school, pushing Hastings into a decline that lasted more than four decades. This wasn't just academic rivalry—it fundamentally changed legal education in California.

The situation created an odd semantic problem. California law stated that Hastings was "affiliated with the University of California, and is the law department thereof." This led Berkeley's program to be euphemistically called a "department" or "school" of jurisprudence for decades, since the university supposedly could only have one "law department."

It took until 1950 for Berkeley to officially become the "School of Law."

The Woman, the Journalist, and the First Degrees

The department awarded its first law degrees in 1903 to three men. One of them was Motoyuki Negoro, who would become a journalist and labor activist—a rather fitting profession for a Berkeley law graduate, given the university's later reputation for social activism.

Three years later, in 1906, Emmy Marcuse became the first woman to earn a law degree from the department. This was just a decade after the program's founding, placing Berkeley ahead of many law schools in opening its doors to women.

A Building Named for a Controversial Benefactor

In 1911, the department moved into a beautiful Beaux-Arts building at the center of campus. It was called Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, named for John Henry Boalt, an Oakland attorney who had died in 1901. His widow, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt, had donated San Francisco land to help fund the construction.

For decades, the school became informally known as "Boalt Hall," though this was never its official name.

That designation was stripped away in 2020, nearly a century later, after revelations about John Henry Boalt's history of anti-Chinese racism came to light. The controversy illustrated how institutions often discover uncomfortable truths about their benefactors only long after those names have become synonymous with the institutions themselves.

The original building, incidentally, still stands. It was renamed Durant Hall and now houses the offices of the deans of the College of Letters and Science.

The Crowding Problem

That beautiful Beaux-Arts building had a problem: it was tiny.

After World War One ended in 1918, a wave of young people flooded into American law schools. By 1921, enrollment at Berkeley had reached 285 students. Everyone from the dean on down complained incessantly about the overcrowding—for three decades.

The Great Depression made it worse. When the economy collapsed, even more young people sought refuge in graduate education. Enrollment hit 297. By 1946, it had stabilized at 275, but this was still far too many people for a building designed for a much smaller program.

Other California law schools expanded rapidly during and after World War Two. Berkeley couldn't—not until it replaced its building.

The Battle Over Standards

After the war, Berkeley faced enormous pressure to grow.

The G.I. Bill was sending veterans back to school in unprecedented numbers. Baby boomers were coming of age. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a legal career. Hastings responded by rapidly expanding its enrollment. Southern Californians successfully lobbied the state legislature to appropriate over a million dollars for a new law school at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Berkeley's faculty made a different choice: they refused to compromise their admission standards.

This decision seemed risky at the time, but it proved prescient. The faculty understood that UCLA and Hastings growing larger actually helped Berkeley by relieving the political pressure to lower its standards. They later supported the creation of yet another UC law school at Davis during the 1960s for the same reason.

The strategy worked. By the 1990s, Berkeley had ascended to the top tier of American law schools. Its exclusivity had become its competitive advantage.

How UCLA's Success Transformed Berkeley

The founding of UCLA's law school in the late 1940s had unexpected consequences for Berkeley.

The pattern was consistent: UCLA would secure some privilege for itself, and Berkeley would either benefit automatically or demand equal treatment and get it.

The most significant example was the right to be formally called a law school. In 1948, William Lloyd Prosser was selected to become Berkeley's next dean. Before officially taking office, he visited UCLA to help plan their new law school. During that visit, he learned that UCLA had managed to get legislation passed creating a "school of law" despite Hastings supposedly being the UC "law department."

Prosser realized Berkeley could do the same thing.

What made this possible was personal connection. Prosser and the dean at Hastings, David Snodgrass, had been friends since their days as classmates at Harvard. Despite the notoriously cold relationship between the two institutions, Snodgrass supported Berkeley's name change. In exchange, Prosser agreed not to challenge legislative appropriations for Hastings.

Effective July 1, 1950, the School of Jurisprudence officially became the School of Law.

The Law Review Wars

Another battle between the two UC law schools involved their academic journals.

The California Law Review had historically operated as an independent nonprofit corporation, funded by subscriptions and advertising. By 1948, postwar inflation had made this business model unsustainable, and the journal was running a budget deficit.

UCLA's first dean, L. Dale Coffman, proposed a solution in 1950: either Berkeley and UCLA could produce a joint law review, or all of California's law schools could combine forces for a single publication.

Berkeley rejected both proposals.

Coffman's response was clever. He persuaded the board of regents in 1952 to fully subsidize the UCLA Law Review. The following year, Berkeley demanded—and received—the same arrangement for the California Law Review.

This pattern of UCLA securing a benefit and Berkeley then claiming parity became so regular that it transformed the governance of both institutions.

The Faculty Feud

One of UCLA's victories created lasting problems for Berkeley that took years to resolve.

Dean Coffman had cultivated an alliance with conservative members of the board of regents. Through this relationship, he secured unusual autonomy for UCLA's law faculty from the university's Academic Senate—the body that normally governs academic matters like appointments, courses, and budgets.

The 1952 amendments to the regents' rules were written so broadly that they affected all UC professional schools offering only graduate-level courses. Berkeley's law faculty suddenly had the same autonomy.

This created a rift.

Faculty from every other academic unit at Berkeley resented the law school's special status. They retaliated by stripping law faculty of the right to serve on any Academic Senate committee with power over appointments, courses, or budgets outside the law school.

This rupture caused considerable headaches for Clark Kerr throughout his tenure as Berkeley's chancellor and during his early years as university president. It wasn't until 1961 that a satisfactory compromise restored the law faculty to full Senate membership.

The New Building

While UCLA was inadvertently causing all this turmoil, Berkeley was finally building its new law school.

Planning had begun in 1946 for a building in the southeastern corner of campus at Bancroft Way and College Avenue. The project had to compete for funding against many other campus initiatives that had been delayed first by the Great Depression, then by the war.

When the state government's allocation of $1.35 million proved insufficient, the law school raised an additional $885,000 from private sources.

The school moved into its new building in fall 1951. The formal dedication ceremony was delayed until March 1952 to coincide with Charter Day celebrations. The new building inherited the name Boalt Hall from its predecessor, which was rechristened Durant Hall.

The View That Never Was

About those windows that the faculty asked to remove: the lecture halls would have overlooked San Francisco Bay. In 1951, no building obstructed that view.

The faculty decided students seeing the bay during lectures would be too distracting.

Today, other buildings block the view anyway. The faculty's sacrifice turned out to be temporary—but they didn't know that at the time. They chose focus over beauty, a decision that says something about what Berkeley's law school valued in that era.

Rebranding for the Modern Era

In April 2008, the law school officially rebranded itself as "Berkeley Law."

The name "Boalt Hall" had never been the school's official designation—that remained "School of Law"—but it had been used so commonly that many people assumed it was. The 2008 rebranding was an attempt to create a clearer identity, one that leveraged the Berkeley name's global recognition.

The complete removal of the Boalt name came in 2020, following research into John Henry Boalt's anti-Chinese writings and advocacy. The building itself retained no name—it simply became the law school building.

What Berkeley Law Became

Today, Berkeley Law enrolls approximately 320 to 330 students in each entering class. These students are further divided into smaller groups that take courses together, creating a more intimate educational experience within a large institution.

The school offers several degree types: the J.D. (Juris Doctor), which is the standard American law degree; the LL.M. (Master of Laws), typically pursued by international lawyers; the J.S.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science), a research doctorate; and a Ph.D. program.

The numbers speak to the school's reputation. In 2019, 98 percent of graduates found full-time employment within nine months, with a median starting salary of $190,000. Among all California law schools, Berkeley had the highest bar passage rates in both 2021 (95.5 percent) and 2022 (92.2 percent).

The Alumni

Berkeley Law's alumni roster reads like a who's who of American legal and political history.

The most famous is probably Earl Warren, who served as Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969. The Warren Court transformed American law, issuing landmark decisions on civil rights, criminal procedure, and legislative reapportionment. Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional, was decided under Warren's leadership.

Other notable alumni include Dean Rusk, who served as Secretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the tumultuous 1960s; Edwin Meese, who was Attorney General under President Reagan; and G. William Miller, who held the rare distinction of serving as both Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Joan Donoghue became President of the International Court of Justice—the main judicial organ of the United Nations, which settles disputes between nations. Ed Lee served as Mayor of San Francisco. Whitney Robson Harris was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes after World War Two.

The alumni network extends beyond government. Terdema Ussery served as CEO of the Dallas Mavericks, bringing legal training to professional sports management.

From Department to Powerhouse

The arc of Berkeley Law's history is striking.

It began as a department of four courses taught by a single professor who didn't really intend to train practicing lawyers. Within a decade, it had become a full law school. Within two decades, it had eclipsed the older, more established Hastings. Within a century, it had become one of the most selective and prestigious law schools in the world.

The story involves bureaucratic maneuvering, architectural compromises, faculty feuds, funding battles, and an unyielding commitment to high standards even when expansion would have been easier.

And it involves that fraternity house—the one that may or may not have forced architects to rotate the building, but definitely stood its ground long enough to matter.

The law school worked around it. That might be the most fitting metaphor for how Berkeley Law built itself: not by removing obstacles, but by finding ways to become excellent despite them.