Effort to fund law school at UC Riverside shelved again

By Malcolm Maclachlan, Daily Journal Staff Reporter

For the fourth time in recent years, efforts to secure funding for a new law school at UC Riverside have been shelved. However, the need for an institution to produce attorneys who can serve the region's rapidly growing population remains critical, supporters say.

Riverside and San Bernardino counties are often referred to as "attorney deserts" due to the scarcity of practicing lawyers in the area. Despite this, there has been little momentum within the UC system to establish a law school that could graduate attorneys with minimal debt, enabling them to serve in regions where their expertise is critically needed.

"Law schools not only provide legal education to our students, but serve as centers of regional legal systems, legal communities and legal economies," Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, D-Riverside, responded in an email after shelving her latest attempt to get funding for the proposed school. "Despite being one of the fastest growing regions of our state, there is still a dearth of accredited law schools in the Inland Empire."

Cervantes did not say why she pulled the bill. She introduced similar legislation in 2019, 2021 and 2023, when she was a member of the Assembly. None of these bills ever received a vote.

UC Davis School of Law professor Lisa R. Pruitt said she did not know why Cervantes decided not to advance SB 91. But she said that University of California officials have been warning that the system will face cuts this year.

Pruitt said that the core idea behind the proposed law school is solid: Educating law students in Riverside would likely lead to more of them remaining in the Inland Empire. However, budget constraints make it unlikely that a public law school in Riverside would be significantly more affordable than its coastal counterparts.

"The chances of them setting their tuition much lower than any of the other UC schools seems really unlikely, so you're not really improving access," Pruitt said.

Nevertheless, the issues that led Cervantes to introduce SB 91 remain. California's inland areas suffer from a shortage of attorneys, and the state does not have enough attorneys willing or financially able to serve working class customers.

"Creating a UC law school in Riverside County could potentially create a pipeline for future legal aid attorneys and private attorneys with a strong commitment to pro bono who can continue to serve their community," said Salena G. Copeland, executive director of the Legal Aid Association of California.

In 2019, Pruitt and Copeland co-chaired the Commission on the Access to Justice's Rural Task Force Committee when it helped produce a report called "California's Attorney Deserts." Most of these deserts were in tiny, rural communities, with two exceptions. The only California counties with populations above 2 million and fewer than one attorney per 500 residents were Riverside, at 577, and San Bernardino, at 754.

Of the seven other California counties with populations above 1 million, only Contra Costa had more than 200 residents per attorney. Most had around 150 residents per attorney, meaning they had four to five times the number of attorneys as the two giant Inland Empire counties.

The two counties have also long had the state's most acute need for judges, according to figures from the Judicial Council. Cervantes' Senate predecessor, Richard Roth, repeatedly carried legislation to increase the number of judgeships in the Central Valley.

Copeland said that unlike other large urban and suburban areas in the state, the Inland Empire does not have many private law schools. But the area has large numbers of low-income people who need the kinds of legal aid that many attorneys provide early in their careers to gain experience.

"I started my career organizing service-learning trips for urban law students from the Bay Area and Sacramento to rural regions of our state," Copeland said. "Organizations that primarily serve rural Californians are typically based in those counties' urban centers -- like Fresno or Watsonville, for example -- and clients must travel to those offices to seek help. In more populous parts of our state, the legal aid organizations can reliably count on law students both throughout the school year and summers to help meet the needs of their clients."

The two newest law schools in the UC system highlight the tension between the need to train lawyers who are willing and able to serve working-class clients and the ambition to create institutions that attract top-tier students, boosting their positions on prestigious rankings lists.

UC Davis School of Law opened in 1965, emerging from a 1960 committee convened by UC Berkeley School of Law. At the time, Berkeley resisted expanding its student body, fearing it would compromise faculty hiring standards and student admissions quality.

The UC Irvine School of Law, established in 2007, rapidly gained prominence under the leadership of founding Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. It secured a substantial endowment early on and quickly climbed the law school rankings. Currently, annual in-state tuition at both UC Davis and UC Irvine exceeds $55,000.

Pruitt noted that the UC label carries an inherent pressure to achieve elite status. However, she suggested that a potential model for a UC Riverside School of Law might lie 300 miles north at the youngest UC campus in Merced. Opened in 2005, UC Merced has often faced criticism as the system's lowest-performing campus. Despite this, Pruitt highlighted its significant achievements: Nearly two-thirds of its students are the first in their families to attend college, and over half are Hispanic.

"I also see a whole lot of praise of Merced because it is this engine of opportunity," Pruitt said.

This story originally appeared on the Daily Journal