UC Berkeley School of Law

The University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Berkeley Law) is the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. The school was commonly referred to as "Boalt Hall" for many years, although it was never the official name. This came from its initial building, the Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, named for John Henry Boalt. This name was transferred to an entirely new law school building in 1951 but was removed in 2020.

In 2019, 98 percent of graduates obtained full-time employment within nine months, with a median salary of $190,000. Of all the law schools in California, Berkeley had the highest bar passage rates in 2021 (95.5%) and 2022 (92.2%). The school offers J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and Ph.D. degrees, and enrolls approximately 320 to 330 J.D. students in each entering class, annually, with each class being further broken down into smaller groups that take courses together.

Berkeley Law alumni include notable federal judges, politicians, Fortune 500 executives, noted legal academics and civil rights experts. Prominent alumni include Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk, U.S. attorney general Edwin Meese, U.S. secretary of the treasury and Chair of the Federal Reserve G. William Miller, President of the International Court of Justice Joan Donoghue, Mayor of San Francisco Ed Lee, Dallas Mavericks CEO Terdema Ussery, and Nuremberg Trials prosecutor Whitney Robson Harris.

The school that is today known as Berkeley Law originated in 1894 as the Department of Jurisprudence of the University of California. On August 17, 1894, the Regents of the University of California approved a resolution for transmission to President Martin Kellogg which directed that the "branch of study" already under the supervision of Professor William Carey Jones was to be separated from the Department of History and Political Science "and formed into a new department embracing: (1) Constitutional Law of the United States, (2) International Law, (3) Roman Law, and (4) Jurisprudence". This resolution had emerged from a subcommittee of the Board of Regents whose members were all lawyers.

Jones personally taught all the new department's courses for the first three years. According to Jones, the inspiration for the department came from his experience in 1882 teaching a course in Roman law to Berkeley seniors. Jones envisioned that the new department would be less vocational and more academic in comparison to the existing Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Initially, the department was merely intended to broaden Berkeley undergraduates' academic knowledge of the law. Students who wished to learn how to actually practice law were referred to Hastings, where coursework already completed at Berkeley could count towards earning Hastings law degrees.

In 1901, the number of faculty was increased to six by the hiring of one lecturer and two instructors, which enabled the department to offer courses adding up to two years of instruction. In 1902, the addition of four more lecturers enabled the department to provide a complete three-year law program and the referrals to Hastings were discontinued. On June 26, 1902, newspapers in San Francisco and Oakland reported that there was now a "complete law school" at Berkeley, whose graduates would be eligible to immediately apply for admission to the California bar without having to take additional courses at Hastings. The department awarded its first law degrees in 1903 to three men, one of whom was journalist and labor activist Motoyuki Negoro. In 1906, Emmy Marcuse was the first woman to earn a law degree from the department.

These fortuitous developments at Berkeley were also a great catastrophe for Hastings. Both law schools had started with one full-time law professor aided by part-time instructors who were practicing lawyers, but only Berkeley made the rapid transition to hiring enough full-time lecturers and professors to teach the majority of its courses and then tightened up its requirements for student admissions and faculty hiring. Berkeley quickly eclipsed Hastings and pushed the older law school into a severe decline which lasted over four decades.

The law that affiliated Hastings with UC states: "The college is affiliated with the University of California, and is the law department thereof." According to UCLA political science professor J.A.C. Grant, the law school at Berkeley was euphemistically labeled a department (or later, school) of jurisprudence for decades because it was believed UC could have only one "law department."