Arizona State Seeks To Relocate Law School To Downtown Phoenix

Say this about the folks at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law: they're a practical bunch.  Every law school wants to make it easy for students to move in and out of the legal practice world while they're 2L's and 3L's.  And it's a lot simpler for students to do that when law firms, government agencies, and public interest shops are only steps from the law school. 

Thus this news: the folks at ASU Law are asking Phoenix voters to fund the law school's move from suburban Tempe into the heart of America's 5th largest city.  It's hard to know how popular this provision will be among Phoenix residents.  It's hard to imagine that a moderately sized law school would do much to transform a neighborhood or create jobs.  But it would surely help ASU in its job placement battle with regional rival, the University of Arizona.  

Image: the Tempe law campus.

Comments

[Matt]

Interesting. There was talk some time ago about whether this big expansion by ASU away from its main campus was a good idea at all, and whether the satellite campuses should be turned in to their own schools in some way. The idea was that it wasn't really a very effective way to run a single university and that the administrative structure was out of wack. I don't know what's happened. I'm not much of a fan of having law schools be cut off from the rest of the university, but perhaps the dean there now is less set on interaction with other departments than Patricia White was. Also, I wonder if it would really give ASU students much more advantage over Arizona student than they have now. Tempe is essentially a suburb of Phoenix anyway, so it's not too hard (by local standards) to go there from close to Tempe, while of course the University of Arizona is a good distance away.

[hhh]

"Every law school wants to make it easy for students to move in and out of the legal practice world while they're 2L's and 3L's. And it's a lot simpler for students to do that when law firms, government agencies, and public interest shops are only steps from the law school."

Funny thing, that Penn State wanted instead to move its law school from a 25-minute drive to the state capital and the many experiential learning, resume-building placements for students with the governor's office, state agencies, federal court, state courts, and many law firms, to a remote county an hour and 40 minutes away, with few law firms and one small court. George Mason and Maryland had it right when they decided to build their law schools where they did.

[Matt]

HHH- I'm curious: do you think that students at Maryland are better off by being in Baltimore than they would be in (essentially) DC, if the law school were on the main U. Maryland campus? My guess would have been that the easier access to DC, the advantages of close interaction with the rest of the (quite good) university, and the advantage they'd still have with being the top law school in Maryland would be worth more than the advantages of being in Baltimore, but I don't know, of course.