In 2008, CUNY School of Law will celebrate its 25^th anniversary of creating attorneys who practice “law in the service of human needs.” Below, we’ve created a timeline that discusses the school’s progress in the last quarter-century.

1973 – The State Board of Regents approves a charter for a law school affiliated with the City University of New York. During the next five years, a core planning council, many of whose members will join as faculty, works to realize the Law School.

1981 – A search committee hires CUNY School of Law’s first dean, Charlie Halpern, founder of the Center for Law and Social Policy, Georgetown law professor, and acknowledged “father of public interest law.”

1982 – Dean Halpern begins work with a small staff and no faculty in a former junior high school building. Dean Halpern lures Professor Howard Lesnick from the University of Pennsylvania Law School to assist in curriculum development. With the assistance of CUNY Law Professor John Farago, they develop a program of legal education that integrates theory with practice.

1983 – 130 students and a dozen faculty members gather in a run-down elementary school, P.S. 130 in Bayside, Queens, for the first day of CUNY School of Law. This facility is fondly remembered for, among other architectural details, water fountains and toilets scaled for 5-to-8-year-olds. The law library is housed in the cafeteria, and the “auditorium” is a transformed gymnasium.

1984 – CUNY Law opens an on-site day care center for faculty, staff, and students.

1985 – The Law School earns provisional accreditation from the American Bar Association (ABA).

1986 – Dean Halpern announces he will step down. A search committee, chaired by Sy Boyers, longtime Chair of the Law School’s Board of Visitors, unanimously recommends as the next dean W. Haywood Burns, a noted civil rights and public interest lawyer, legal educator, founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and at the time of his appointment, Vice Provost and Dean for Legal Studies and Director of the Urban Legal Studies program at City College.

The Law School opens in what was formerly Campbell Junior High School. The clinics develop, devoted to Immigration and Citizenship and Health in the Workplace and later evolve into Main Street Legal Services, Inc., one of the largest law firms in Queens.

1987 – Dean Burns takes office and serves until September 1994. Under his stewardship, more than half the faculty earns tenure and the curriculum is substantially refined. An intensive effort to increase diversity among law school students and faculty takes root.

1992 – The Law School earns accreditation from the ABA.

1994 – The Law School is designated a separate unit within the CUNY structure, and the Dean sits with the CUNY Council of Presidents.

The student-run and organized Mississippi Project of CUNY Law gets off the ground to provide legal services in the Mississippi Delta in voting rights cases. The team of students, under faculty supervision, later adds representation of workers in the poultry and catfish farm industries, as well as labor, disability and employment claims. Student work continues today.

1995 – Kristin Booth Glen is named the school’s third Dean following a year in which Professor Merrick (“Rick”) Rossein serves as Interim Dean. Dean Glen had served for 30 years as a civil rights/public interest lawyer, activist, law teacher (both as an adjunct and as a clinical teacher) and trial and appellate judge in the New York State courts.

1996 – Haywood Burns dies in South Africa.

1997 – A faculty chair in honor of Haywood Burns’ memory is created.

In response to a growing crisis in the number of students receiving public assistance, the Law School creates a project in which law students counsel and represent CUNY undergraduates many of them single mothers, striving to move themselves and their children out of poverty to help retain their public assistance benefits. The program is now called the Economic Justice Project.

The Law School receives a grant from the Open Society Institute to develop two signature programs. The first, CUNY School of Law Immigrant Initiatives is designed to build on the strength of the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Clinic and to advise other law schools developing advocacy programs for immigrants. The initiative also works to secure citizenship for immigrant students at all CUNY campuses. The model projects developed in this program continue today to engage law students in community counseling and citizenship work throughout the city. A second project results in the development of “modules” on immigration and immigrants’ issues for non-immigration-related Law School courses, including those in Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, Family Law, Labor Law and clinical courses.

1998 – The Law School celebrates its 15^th anniversary.

Through another Open Society grant, an additional signature program at CUNY Law, the Community Legal Resource Network (CLRN), begins operation. CLRN is designed to increase access to justice in underserved parts of New York City by supporting CUNY Law graduates who return to underserved communities to provide legal services from small and solo practices.

1999 – The Carnegie Foundation announces that it will begin a five-year study of professional education, starting with examination of the legal field. CUNY Law, along with Yale, New York University, and UC/Berkeley, is featured in the Foundation’s book of “best practices” in legal education.

2000 – A labyrinth and garden are created behind the Law School. Also included are bistro tables and a wisteria arbor with benches beneath.

For the first time, U.S. News & World Report ranks the Law School’s clinical programs fourth in the nation, behind only Georgetown, NYU and Yale. The School continues consistently to rank in the top 10 in this category.

2001 – The Law School enrolls its most diverse class in history, with an age range of 20 to 48, 21 languages spoken among its students, and high percentages of African-American, Hispanic, Asian Pacific Islander and other minorities enrolled.

2002 – U.S. News & World Report adds a new category, “Student Diversity,” to its specialized rankings of law schools, with the Law School ranked the most diverse school in the country.

2004 – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visits the Law School and praises it as “an institution of incomparable value.” She also commends the school’s leadership for “innovations and tireless advancement of public interest law.”

Dean Glen resigns to become a Surrogate Court judge in Manhattan.

2006 – Michelle J. Anderson is named the school’s fourth Dean following a year in which Mary Lu Bilek serves as Interim Dean. A graduate of Yale Law School where she was Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal and Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, Dean Anderson was a member of the faculty of Villanova University School of Law from 1998 to 2006. Dean Anderson has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

CUNY School of Law posts a New York State Bar Exam passage rate of 77 percent, the highest rate in the school’s history at the time.

2007 – The Law School is cited by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for innovation in integrating traditional legal coursework with clinical practice. The designation leads to an invitation from the Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Law School to join Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, New York University School of Law and others to focus on the future of law school education nationwide.

Professor Ruthann Robson is named a CUNY distinguished professor.

A new program, Pipeline to Justice, is created to offer a second chance at CUNY Law School admission to less privileged applicants whose LSAT scores are too low on the first try. The program, under the direction of Associate Dean Mary Lu Bilek, is the first of its kind in the nation at a law school. Pipeline enrolls 38 students in its first year.

CLRN opens the Incubator For Justice in Midtown Manhattan to train new solo and small-group practitioners how to manage the business side of their law practices. With funding from CUNY and outside foundations, the Incubator is the first program of its type for solo practitioners in the law.

CUNY School of Law posts the highest New York State Bar Exam passage rate in its history, with 83 percent of students passing.

2008 – CUNY Law is accepted for membership by the Association of American Law Schools, the society of legal scholars. To attain AALS membership standing, a school is subjected to rigorous review of all aspects of its program, including admissions, academics, finances and other matters.