Dean's Message

By the time you read this, your law school will be celebrating its 175th birthday.

The University of North Carolina School of Law was born from a close friendship between two North Carolina leaders: UNC President David Lowry Swain (1801-68) and William Horn Battle (1802-79). Swain, a former legislator, Superior Court judge and governor, approached Battle, also a Superior Court judge and future associate justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, in the early 1840s with the proposition that Battle move a private law school he had started in Raleigh to Chapel Hill.

The concept of university-based legal education had already found a foothold at private colleges in New England and at the University of Virginia. But in North Carolina, aspiring lawyers were still expected to read law with an established attorney or judge, who might offer room and board along with sporadic tuition on the treatises of Blackstone and Coke. When the student felt he was ready, he offered himself for admission to practice by examination before the justices of the state Supreme Court.

Swain and Battle wanted something different. “My plan would be to make the law school an integral part of the university,” Swain wrote, “and to confer degrees as at Harvard.” Battle responded enthusiastically: “[A] school of that character would be more likely to secure a liberal and permanent support at the University than at any other place in the state.” By 1845, UNC-CH’s trustees had appointed Battle as the University’s first professor of law. The nation’s first state university had a law school and North Carolina its first graduate and professional school.

Today, the tie between our school and the University of North Carolina is far stronger than Swain and Battle could have hoped for. Large numbers of our students were educated as undergraduates at UNC System institutions. Our new Institute for Innovation was launched in summer 2019 to provide basic legal services to startup for-profit and nonprofit organizations on our campus and at N.C. State University. Our faculty offer courses to undergraduates, both alone and in collaboration with colleagues from the College of Arts and Sciences, and to students at other professional and graduate schools. Law professors regularly chair important committees and perform tasks of critical importance to the University as a whole.

As I approach the fifth anniversary of my service as dean, I believe my work boils down to one task: Ensuring that Carolina Law remains both excellent and accessible. These two ideals are in constant and creative tension with one another, demanding the best of those on whom the burden of leadership has been laid. I am not alone in the task. It is yours too.

Excellence today means something different than what it meant when many of us were in Chapel Hill. Our students rightly expect far more from their law school experience than we did. I believe the faculty and staff who support their earliest years as members of the world’s noblest profession are the best we have ever assembled here. This excellence is expensive – and so well worth the investment.

Making Carolina Law accessible to students who deserve to benefit from its treasures before taking up the professional mantles of their choosing, is our equally critical mission.

Please help us do all in our power to accomplish both.