Law Schools

Doris Brin Walker, a radical lawyer who fought anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s and helped clear activist Angela Davis of murder and kidnapping charges in the 1970s, died of a stroke Aug. 13 at a San Francisco hospital, her daughter, Emily Roberson, said. She was 90. A lifelong Communist and the only woman in her Boalt Hall law school class in 1942, Walker was a tenacious advocate who took on many difficult cases without pay. Among these was the 1959 trial of John W. Powell, a writer accused of sedition for publishing an article alleging that the United States used germ warfare during the Korean War. Her most high-profile case was the sensational 1972 trial of Davis, an avowed Communist and recently fired UCLA professor who faced the death penalty because a gun registered in her name was linked to the 1970 slayings of a Marin County judge and three abductors.

In a challenging fundraising climate, the first new public law school in California in more than a generation begins classes Monday at UC Irvine with 61 top-flight students, a highly regarded faculty and the goal of becoming a model for an innovative legal education emphasizing hands-on experience and public service. It has been less than two years since the school's founding dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, was hired, fired and rehired by UCI Chancellor Michael Drake during a weeklong fiasco that focused attention on Chemerinsky's outspoken liberal politics and whether conservative critics had quietly lobbied for his ouster.

The California Supreme Court ordered the State Bar on Monday to permit a quadriplegic law school grad to take the bar examination today, even though her application for the test had not been processed. The court acted in response to a petition from Sara Granda, 29, who had asked it to intervene. The State Bar of California also wrote to the court and asked for guidance after Granda's plight attracted media attention and sympathy from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For a teenager from a Puerto Rican family struggling upward from the public housing projects of the Bronx, Princeton University in 1972 was a foreign land. "I felt isolated from all I had ever known," she said later, and the low grade she got on one of her first papers drove home the point -- sending her flying to get remedial help. Four years later, Sonia Maria Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the highest honor awarded a Princeton undergraduate.

Kenneth C. Bass III, the Justice Department official who helped write the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the federal government with the approval of a special court to spy on foreigners suspected of espionage in the United States, died of cancer April 27 at his home in Great Falls, Va. He was 65.

Harold Hongju Koh, an outspoken advocate of human rights and international law, has been chosen to be the top lawyer at the State Department. Koh, dean at the Yale Law School, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's approach to the detention and trial of terrorism suspects, calling a 2002 memo justifying harsh interrogation methods a "stain on our national reputation."

Tucked away in the second-floor library at USC's Gould School of Law, the Lincoln Reading Room houses a trove of rare books, family portraits, campaign memorabilia and other artifacts honoring one of the nation's most revered presidents. Law students using the room can't help but feel the presence of Abraham Lincoln as he gazes from an engraving of himself and his family in the White House.

When California public schools resume classes Monday, high school and college journalism advisors will be protected by a new state law designed to promote 1st Amendment freedoms. The so-called Journalism Teacher Protection Act, which became law Thursday, prohibits school administrators from retaliating against advisors for trying to protect student press freedoms.

UC Irvine's new law school, set to open next fall, is offering a big incentive to top students worried about the cost of a legal education during the recession: free tuition for three years. The financial carrot is part of an ambitious strategy by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned constitutional law scholar, to attract Ivy League-caliber students. The school hopes to offer full scholarships to all 60 members of its inaugural class in 2009 -- but only the best and brightest need apply.

Americans have been debating the fairness and efficacy of racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions for more than 30 years. Now a UCLA professor is seeking to test his hypothesis that affirmative action programs actually hurt the career prospects of minority law school graduates. But he has been hampered in his research by the indefensible failure of the State Bar of California to provide the statistics he needs. The professor, Richard H. Sander, has requested data about the performance of white and minority law school graduates on the bar examination, along with information about the schools they attended and their grades.