Fall 2005
LAW SCHOOL BRIEFS
Class of 2008 Most Selective in WUCL’s History College of Law’s acceptance rate dropped for the first time to 35 percent, making the Class of 2008 the most selective in the history of the college.
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he College of Law Admission Office received a record number of new student applications for the Class of 2008. For the third consecutive year, College of Law applications increased by more than 20 percent over the previous year. For the semester starting fall 2005, Willamette received 1,554 law school applications — a 23 percent increase from 2004 and a 107.5 percent increase since 2002.
“We are pleased with this progress,” said College of Law Dean Symeon C. Symeonides, “but we continue to aim higher.” On August 17, 2005, the College of Law welcomed the Class of 2008 to campus with a threeday new student orientation. The 145 law students who compose the first-year class represent 75 undergraduate institutions in 23 states. Among them, 54 percent are women, and 11 percent identified themselves as persons of color. Twenty-six percent of the incoming class reported an alumni connection to Willamette.
While Willamette received the highest number of law student applications in the school’s history, law student applications across the country decreased 1.4 percent from the previous year. Also significant, the
Dean’s Book Lauded as a ‘Brilliant Contribution to Legal Theory’
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n May 2005 the Michigan Law Review published its annual “Survey of Books Related to the Law,” which included a review of a book by College of Law Dean Symeon C. Symeonides. In her review, Professor Louise Weinberg, holder of the Bates Chair in Law at the University of Texas, characterized Symeonides’ book as a “brilliant contribution to legal theory, an impressive, original, one-of-a-kind book.”
has just completed, will be the pilot of a new series called “Hague Academy Classics” to be launched in 2006.
Symeonides’ book, The American Choice-of-Law Revolution in the Courts: Today and Tomorrow (Leiden/ Boston 2003), is part of the prestigious, century-old series Recueil des Cours of the Hague Academy of International Law, where Symeonides lectured in 2002. The book’s second edition, which Symeonides
The reviewer concluded: “This is not only a most original monograph, not only a major contribution to the literature, not only a fine course in conflict of laws, not only a treatise from which sophisticates and novices alike can learn much, not only an intellectual adventure, but quite simply a book one can very much enjoy reading.”
In her 39-page review of this book, which discusses the development of American conflicts law in the last 50 years, Weinberg praised the author’s “formidable erudition” and “characteristically evenhanded” treatment of this difficult subject. “No one else could have written this book,” the reviewer noted, “[n]or could it have been written by anyone without Symeonides’ intimate familiarity with current American conflicts cases ... [and] European as well as American theory.”
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