Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, introduced a bill at a Senate Education Committee meeting Tuesday to create a new law school at the University of North Texas.
If the bill is passed, the school would be located in downtown Dallas rather than at UNT’s Denton campus, and the law school’s first class would matriculate in 2011.
Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, a private institution, currently serves the Dallas population, which would make UNT’s the first public law school to open in the Dallas area.
The UNT System is asking the Legislature for $40 million in tuition revenue bonds to fund the initiative and will receive the land for the school as well as additional funding from the city of Dallas.
UNT System Chancellor Lee Jackson said the new school would help cater to an under-served population of students who want to attend a public law school in Texas.
“The pool of law school applicants has been growing over the years as Texas’s population grows,” said Jackson, a former Dallas County judge. “More selectivity is a good thing, but from a statistical perspective, the chances for an individual applicant to get into a Texas public law school are less and less.”
UT President William Powers said a new law school could create budget concerns in the already fiscally strained Legislature.
“There’s only so much funding to go around,” Powers said. “We’ve got to take care of the existing higher education infrastructure, including the two flagships. I think the priorities of the state ought to be the two flagship institutions and UT in particular because they provide a very important service for the state as internationally renowned research universities.”
Powers and UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa have been pushing the Legislature to increase funding for UT. Powers’ campaign for an additional $3 billion in University funding has raised $790 million so far.
Bills to start a law school at UNT have been introduced twice before but failed to pass on both occasions. West said that this time he is confident the bill will go through because of strong support in the House.
The Legislature will hear testimony this week on a similar bill to create a law school at the University of Texas at Brownsville that, if passed, would further stretch the state’s finances. West said that he thinks UNT’s law school bid will pass despite the challenging financial climate for higher education.
“If we were depending just on the state, that might give me pause, but we also have support from the city of Dallas,” West said. “The costs are really dependent on whether there is a demand for a law school.”
Texas currently hosts public law schools at UT-Austin, Texas Tech, Texas Southern University and the University of Houston. Texas also has five other private law schools. UNT’s law school would be the first Texas public law school built in 40 years.
Powers said he understands the need for new professional schools in Texas. A new law school at UNT would have little effect on UT law school admissions, he said.
“If new law schools were to start up, they’d be taking students from a range of admissions criteria that are not students who would be competitive at UT-Austin’s law school,” Powers said. “They will be admitting from a different group of law school aspirants, so there will be no impact on UT law school admissions.”
