The University of Delaware has scrapped its plans to build a law school, Inside Higher Ed reports. While the law school was part of the “university’s strategic plan, published in 2008, to increase its prominence and reputation,” the expense proved to be too prohibitive. The demand may still remain for a public law school in Delaware (there is no public law school in the state and only one private, Widener University), but plans are shelved for the moment.
Other universities have also recently abandoned their plans to build law schools, including Husson College, the University of New Haven, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Wilkes University, “citing a tough fund-raising environment, high start-up costs, and less demand among potential students. While the decisions by a handful of universities won’t change the law school market overnight, they challenge the conventional wisdom that law schools are a relatively easy, profitable undertaking for universities.”
Of course, there are always exceptions—the most notable being UC Irvine’s law school, which opened in 2009 with the help of a $20 million gift in addition to other endowments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to Charles Cannon, the assistant dean of development and external affairs, Irvine makes the process seem easy, but “that plan is probably not replicable for other universities without major windfalls or other fortuitous circumstances.”
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