SoCal law school tempts students with free tuition

AP – Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the new law school at the University of California-Irvine, poses in his temporary …

IRVINE, Calif. – A new law school opening next fall in Southern California is offering a big incentive to top students who might be thinking twice about the cost of a legal education during the recession: free tuition for three years.

The financial carrot is part of an ambitious strategy by Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned constitutional law scholar and dean of the new school at the University of California, Irvine, to attract Ivy League-caliber students to the first new law school in the state in 40 years.

Scholarship winners will be chosen for their potential to emerge three years later as legal stars on the ascendance. Only the best and brightest need apply, but the school hopes to offer full scholarships to all 60 members of its inaugural class in 2009. Subsequent classes will be on a normal tuition basis.

Chemerinsky is convinced the prospect of free education, combined with a public-interest curriculum and the University of California moniker, will quickly fill his first class and eventually land Irvine among the nation's best law schools.

"Our goal is to be a top 20 law school from the first time we are ranked," he said.

Such a rapid rise to prominence would be unprecedented, but not impossible, said Richard Morgan, the founding dean of Boyd Law School at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 1998, when that state had no law school.

"It's like trying to fly the plane while you're still building it," he said.

Morgan warned that starting a new law school is daunting, and that the competition for top-notch students is fierce.

There are 200 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association, including two new schools in North Carolina. Several others are in the planning stages in New York state, and dozens of unaccredited schools operate across the country.

At last count, 141,719 students were enrolled in ABA-accredited schools.

"During an economic downturn there is historically an increase in law school applications," Chemerinsky said, explaining it's an attractive option for undergrads with poor job prospects.

Luring top students hasn't been the only challenge for Chemerinsky, an unapologetic liberal.

A year ago, he was a professor at Duke University when he was tapped to be dean of the new school in the heart of conservative Orange County. He was soon fired amid concerns about his liberal politics, as evidenced on numerous occasions during his 21 years as a professor at the University of Southern California.

He was rehired in the span of a weekend after campus protests and editorials cited his treatment while making the case for academic freedom.

Chemerinsky insists the law school will have no ideological orientation.

In a signal that political hatchets have been buried, Chemerinsky and UC Irvine Chancellor Michael V. Drake, who hired, fired and rehired him, will jointly teach a course in civil rights law when the school opens.

With the dustup settled, Chemerinsky has plunged ahead, hiring 19 law professors and administrators, including some who are abandoning jobs at prestigious universities. The school hopes to eventually enroll 600 students and employ 40 to 50 professors.

Rachel Moran, president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, is leaving her longtime post at the University of California, Berkeley's revered Boalt Hall to teach at Irvine. She likens it to a "Star Trek" adventure.

"You're going where nobody's gone before," she said. "I feel that it's going to be a remarkable ride."

A law school has been part of the UC Irvine's long-term plan since the university opened in 1965, according to the school's Web site. Its cost was incorporated into the campus growth plan, and Chemerinsky says no additional state funds will be needed to cover its estimated first year costs of $25 million.

Some money has been saved by housing the school in existing campus buildings.

It's also the beneficiary of a $20 million startup grant from Donald Bren, chairman of the giant Irvine Co. development firm, and a $1 million grant from the Joan Irvine Smith and Athalie R. Clarke Foundation that will pay for the core collection at the law library.

Other Orange County businesses and law firms are pledging sizable donations to bolster an ambitious $100 million fundraising effort during the next 10 years.

Chemerinsky said he has made substantial progress toward raising the $6 million needed to fund full scholarships for his inaugural class. He's promising students a unique educational program with hands-on experience in legal clinics and eventual job interviews with more than 70 law firms, public interest law organizations and government offices.

Still, in a society seemingly overloaded with lawyers, the question arises: Do we need another law school to churn out more lawyers?

"There isn't a need for another law school like all the rest," Chemerinsky answers. "This is our chance to create the ideal law school for the 21st century."

poverty and the brain?

The Frontal Cortex

Poverty and the Brain

Category:

Whatever It Takes, the new book by Paul Tough that profiles Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, is one of the most bracing, sobering and inspiring books I've read in a while. It's the story of one man's attempt to systematically disrupt the cycle of poverty, and fundamentally alter the nature of childhood in Harlem. Fixing the schools is only a small part of the solution: Canada realized that it was also crucial to change the typical parent-child interaction, and so he developed a Baby College where new parents are given lessons on how to speak to their child in the supermarket. In other words, poverty is a culture, a contagious way of life, and not something that can be fixed with smaller class size.

But this isn't simply a book about social work and education. Tough also deftly summarizes much of the recent work done on the cognitive neuroscience of poverty, or how our brain is changed by the details of our upbringing. (One crucial finding is that "middle-class" parents are much more verbose than parents living in poverty. For instance, one study found that wealthier parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" towards to their child per hour. In contrast, homes with a parent on welfare averaged a mere 178 utterances per hour. This leads, over time, to dramatic differences in the vocabulary size of the child, which strongly correlates with IQ.) Martha Farah is doing some of the most interesting work in the field right now:

Farah knew that cognitive neuroscience generally divided the higher mental functions into five different systems. And neuroscientists had developed tests to measure the strength of each of the systems in any individual. When Farah gave tests to several different groups of children in Philadelphia and New York City, she found that middle-class children scored higher than poor children, on average, on the tests as a whole. But there were four specific areas where the poorer children lagged most significantly: language; long-term memory; working memory; and cognitive control, the ability to resist obvious (but wrong) answers and find unexpected ones.

Already, Farah had broken new ground. She had deduced precisely which mental abilities seemed to correlate most strongly with socioeconomic status. But she still didn't know why that correlation existed. What was it about growing up in a poor household that hindered the development of those four systems? To answer that question, Farah turned to the HOME inventory. [The HOME inventory, or the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment, is a popular way to evaluate parental behavior.] [SNIP] Farah then compared each family's HOME score with the child's scores on the various neuroscience tests. The result? For the first time, Farah was able to ascertain exactly which systems in a child's brain are affected by which parental behaviors. Children's scores on the language tests were predicted by cognitive stimulation. Children's scores on the memory tests were predicted by social/emotional nurturance. In other words, a child with loving but not particularly educationally oriented parents would be likely to do well on memory tests and poorly on language tests.

The point is that poverty isn't just an idea, or a state of mind: it actually warps the mind. Some brains never even have a chance. Consider this depressing finding from the lab of Elizabeth Gould. She found that if a pregnant rhesus monkey is forced to endure stressful conditions--like being startled by a blaring horn for 10 minutes a day--her children are born with reduced neurogenesis, even if they never actually experience stress once born. This pre-natal trauma, just like trauma endured in infancy, has life-long implications. The offspring of monkeys stressed during pregnancy have smaller hippocampi, suffer from elevated levels of glucocorticoids and display all the classical symptoms of anxiety.

There are no easy answers in Whatever It Takes. While Canada's efforts have led to some important gains in test scores, he's also found that it's incredibly difficult to teach or reach a child in the grip of poverty by middle-school. In other words, every intervention must start early, while the brain is still a wet ball of clay.

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