Whittier Law School

An Orange County law school hopes to ease the stress on the financially burdened California court system by offering its newly christened practice courtroom on campus as a venue for official legal proceedings. Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa will offer to host public court proceedings, including trials and arbitration hearing. Such an arrangement would benefit students, allowing them to observe the proceedings in the school's fully functioning 4,400-square-foot courtroom, officials said.

An Orange County law school hopes to ease the stress on the financially burdened California court system by offering its newly christened practice courtroom on campus as a venue for official legal proceedings. Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa will offer to host public court proceedings, including trials and arbitration hearing. Such an arrangement would benefit students, allowing them to observe the proceedings in the school's fully functioning 4,400-square-foot courtroom, officials said.

Whittier Law School, which moved to Costa Mesa a year ago, will host an open house Saturday for prospective students. Events begin at 11 a.m. at Whittier Law School, 3333 Harbor Blvd. Admission and parking are free. Information: (714) 444-4141, Ext. 123.

Ken Lamb, 55, a prosecutor who completed more than 620 felony trials in his 25 years with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, died Tuesday of cancer at his Long Beach home, the D.A.'s office announced. "He's the Babe Ruth of trial lawyers," Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley told The Times in 2004. As of that year, 530 of the cases Lamb tried had ended in convictions. The total included 155 sexual assaults, 109 homicides, six insanity pleas and two death-penalty cases. "I don't cherry-pick," Lamb said in 2004.

Cindy Ann Raisch, 37, associate dean of Whittier Law School, who was honored for her work on referring the public to lawyers. Educated at Rutgers University and USC, Ms. Raisch by 1984 became the directing attorney of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.'s lawyer referral service, the largest such service in the country. She was recognized by both the State Bar of California and the National Assn. of Bar Executives for that work.

Whittier Law School will open its new campus on a 15-acre site in Costa Mesa in August 1997, school officials have announced. The institution is buying a commercial site at Harbor Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue and will renovate the buildings. College and city officials hailed the plan, saying the school will be a boon to the legal and business communities in Orange County, the largest metropolitan area in the nation without an American Bar Assn.-accredited law school.

Whittier College Law School's first Orange County classes will begin this fall near an Irvine shopping center, college officials said. The college revealed plans in February to move the 650-student law school from Los Angeles to Orange County. The 20-year-old law school now operates out of a 60,000-square-foot facility in Los Angeles' Hancock Park area. College officials are negotiating for a permanent site in Irvine.

John A. FitzRandolph, who over a quarter-century as teacher and dean led drives for accreditation, relocation and growth of Whittier Law School, has died at 65. FitzRandolph died Thursday in Laguna Hills of cancer, campus officials said. "For many people," said the law school's interim dean, Frederick G. Slabach, "John was Whittier Law School." FitzRandolph joined the faculty in 1976, a year after the school was founded.

They endured the hassles familiar to anyone who has moved. The phones stopped working a few days last week. Nervous owners sweated over the handling of computers and other precious goods. And for a while, with boxes strewn here and there, it looked as if the place would need endless sprucing up before it felt like home. But in less than a week, Whittier Law School will open after moving from Los Angeles to become Orange County's only nationally accredited law school and newest college.

Arts supporter and South Coast Plaza developer Henry Segerstrom has donated $500,000 for a new reading room at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa. During a ceremony Thursday, officials unveiled a bronze plaque to dedicate the recently completed Segerstrom Family Reading Room. Segerstrom, of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, and his family were recognized for their generosity and commitment to legal education. Segerstrom called the law school "a jewel for Costa Mesa and the entire Orange County community."

Re "That's a losing hand," Opinion, Oct. 24 I never would have believed it, but Joel Stein won me over on this column. Our "moral" government trying to stop online gambling is almost the biggest joke since it started to spend billions of dollars in Iraq. When does it ever turn down tax revenue from the middle class and poor? Grow up, Washington, tax the heck out of it and save me $10 on my taxes next year. MARGO L. ALLEN Laguna Woods The ultimate irony of the bill banning Internet gambling is that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist rammed the prohibition through Congress by attaching it to the unrelated SAFE Ports Act and wouldn't let Democrats read the final language.

When an association of female law students at Southern Methodist University filed a discrimination suit against this city's largest law firms in 1975, they approached one of the law school's more successful women graduates for help. The lawyer, who was fast making a name for herself in local legal circles, had been rejected by some of the big firms, even though her credentials surpassed those of some male applicants.

A federal judge offered a tentative ruling Wednesday that would temporarily prevent the American Bar Assn. from stripping an Orange County law school of its national accreditation, but then seemed to have doubts. U.S. District Judge Gary L. Taylor, who has a law degree from UCLA, must rule on the temporary injunction by Friday.

In "Turn Theft Into a Net Gain" (editorial, May 23) you wrote: "If there's a lesson from the Grokster ruling, it's that U.S. copyright laws -- crafted early last century to protect the sheet music industry from the player piano -- can't keep up in the 21st century." While your statement is an accurate description of the 1909 Copyright Act, Congress enacted an entirely revised Copyright Act in 1976, and the 1976 act has been amended more than a dozen times since. The current Copyright Act may be outdated in some respects, but it is misleading to suggest that it is almost a century old. Tyler T. Ochoa Professor, Center for Intellectual Property Law Whittier Law School

There's an old joke law school deans like to tell: What does it take to create a law school as well-known and respected as Harvard? Answer: $300 million. And 300 years. Parham Williams likes to repeat it because, as dean of Chapman University's School of Law, he believes it embraces the ambitious goals he has set for the 7-year-old institution he's nursed back to health from a troubled beginning: Excellence, built brick by brick over the long haul.

James Eves and his friends assumed that police often pull over and search carloads of young black men on Orange County streets. So they didn't protest when it happened to them last year. Now the 17-year-old student at Foothill High School in Tustin knows they didn't have to consent automatically to the search because, he says, there was no reasonable suspicion that they had done anything wrong.

For Andy Hoang, the path was always clear. If he was smart and worked hard, he would go to medical school and become a doctor. If that didn't work out, he could always become a lawyer. Lisa Trinh's parents envisioned a similar future for their daughter. "The legal profession is not in high regard in Vietnam as it is here," Hoang said. "In Vietnam, if you were an intellect, you'd go into medicine. Law was seen as an easier avenue."

"The Lessons of School Violence" (Aug. 22) reported that even though a San Diego County task force agreed that "there is no way to predict or 'profile' a school shooter," it recommended that additional police be stationed on campuses. In reality, students should fear the overreaction by the task force more than the possibility of another school shooter. In its Sept. 6, 2000, report, the FBI concluded that "the actual threat level" of a school shooting is very low and that "news coverage magnifies a number of widespread but wrong or unverified impressions [such as the belief that]