EUGENE–Things soon will look very different for the University of Oregon School of Law as it prepares to enter a new building and a new era in legal education.

The law school’s new academic year begins on Wednesday, Aug. 19, marking the last time an entering class will be in Grayson Hall (UO Law Center), 1101 Kincaid St.

"This will be an exciting and busy year for everyone at the law school as we prepare to pick up stakes and move into our new, state-of-the-art facility," says UO law school dean Rennard Strickland.

Construction began in June of 1997 on the new law center at East 15th Avenue and Agate Street and is slated for completion in early 1999. The new 138,000-square-foot facility will have more classrooms, flexible study and meeting areas. It will double the law library space, making it possible to store the library’s entire collection, one-third of which is now stored elsewhere on campus. The new facility also will offer state-of-the art connectivity to on-line information data bases, on-line classes and live video teleconferencing.

"Our goal is to make the transition to the new building as seamless as possible so as not to disrupt the students’ academic experience," says Strickland. "So, even though the building will be completed by early spring, we won’t begin the move until after graduation ceremonies in May and will be ready to open our doors to students in the new facility in August of 1999."

The $25 million center is being financed with $10.3 million from the sale of state bonds and $15.3 million from gifts and grants. The new UO Law Center will be named in honor of 1932 law school graduate William W. Knight, whose son, Philip Knight, last year committed $10 million to the law school building project.

The law school also is positioning itself to meet the changing needs of its students as it approaches the new millennium and will soon embark on a planning process for legal education in the 21st century.

"This process will allow us to ask ourselves what the practice of law will look like in the next century, because our class will have people practicing to the year 2050," says Strickland.

The planning process will involve judges, lawyers, business people, community leaders and faculty who will look at things lawyers are doing now and can do in the future, how the demands of the economy and society are going to change, and how the law school can help prepare students for these changes.

"The legal profession reinvents itself every 50 years or so," says Strickland. "After the Great Depression and New Deal, for example, we moved into a major association between law, business and government. And so the question we will be addressing is ‘what are the shifts that are going to occur that will substantially impact law and Oregon?’"

Strickland says some of these shifts are already known, such as new technologies, the Internet and intellectual property law, globalization and international perspectives in legal education, alternative dispute resolution, and violence and the law–particularly as it relates to juveniles.

This year’s entering class contains approximately 175 students, meeting the school’s target enrollment goal. With this year’s entering class, overall enrollment will be approximately 530 students of which 50 percent are women and 15 percent are minorities.

Of the law school’s 31 tenure-track faculty, more than half are women and minorities.

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