For those of you who don't scour the law school news feed daily – and God only knows what you do with your time - here are three items to contemplate over this pleasant June weekend.
1. Ave Maria has now left its Ann Arbor campus. For those of you who worry that this will mean yet another abandoned building in Michigan, never fear. The Thomas M. Cooley Law School has taken over the 85,000 square foot former law school and is turning it into…a law school! This will be Cooley's fourth campus – adding to its existing portfolio of Lansing, Grand Rapids, and Auburn locations. The new campus opens this September – and Cooley has already received deposits for over 80 of the slots. This expansion should help Cooley rise in the Thomas Cooley Judging the Law Schools rankings (where Cooley ranked #12 last year, behind Minnesota but ahead of Stanford, Penn, and UCLA) since these ingenious rankings are based on the famous Latin saying, maior est melior.
2. The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover has outgrown its crabbed portfolio and will soon be expanding into undergraduate studies. It is creating the new American College of History and Legal Studies, a school dedicated exclusively to teaching history. The ACHLS (my abbreviation), which will be an "undergraduate completion college" (catering exclusively to juniors and seniors), and will open next year. Apparently Nancy Rapoport isn't the only person thinking about a new way to harness community college graduates! For those of you trying to figure out why you don't know more about MSLA (and no, I don't mean the Mississippi Surplus Lines Association), here's a little nugget.
3. The University of North Texas – Dallas will soon have its own law school, assuming that Governor Rick Perry signs the Texas legislature's authorization into law. What's less clear is whether this UNT campus, located in downtown Dallas, has sufficient money to welcome its first class in the Fall of 2010.