In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University’s law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
In case you missed the story, soon after Scalia died last winter, an anonymous donor and the Charles Koch Foundation joined to contribute $30 million to the school, the largest gift in the university’s history. The donors conditioned their grant—which will go entirely to new scholarships—on the name change. The Board of Visitors and then the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia approved. It is now the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
The name change at first drew objections from liberals in the university and the Virginia state capitol. Those complaining weren’t just opposed to Scalia—more than 100 GMU professors calumniated him in a petition as an advocate of “racism, sexism, and homophobia.” They were also threatened by the rise and influence of a law school that, since its founding in 1979, has been known for its libertarian and conservative interests. But, happily, theirs was a losing fight. At the dedication ceremony this month, Justice Elena Kagan—an appointee of President Barack Obama—answered anyone wanting to know, as she put it, why “a fine law school like this one should bear Justice Scalia’s name.”
He was one of the most important justices ever, said Kagan. Also one of the greatest. He articulated textualist and originalist principles that did “nothing less than transform our legal culture.” He changed the way judges and lawyers think and talk about the law, even if they disagree with him. “That’s a legacy worthy of a law school dedication,” she said.
Another reason for the name change has to do with law students: No one, said Kagan, was more enthusiastic about engaging law students. He “turned it all on—his brilliance, his wit, his good cheer.” He would joke about how he’d go to law schools just to make trouble: “I’d give lectures and stir up the students. It takes several weeks for their professors to put them back on track,” he would say. Scalia, as Kagan put it, “made them think harder than they had ever thought before about how to do law.” Students skeptical they’d ever agree with Scalia found out they could. They’d say: “He just has to be right about this.” “And so he was, not always but often,” added Kagan.
Getting more and better-qualified students—even ones who could go toe-to-toe with Scalia—is what the generous gift to the law school is about.
Undergraduate grade point average and Law School Admissions Test scores have a major impact upon law school rankings. And not until 2001 did George Mason Law have enough students with the necessary academic credentials to become a top-tier (where the 50 best law schools hang out) school. It has made the top 50 every year since.
Staying there is the challenge. When Henry Butler became dean of the school in June 2015, he moved to prevent it from falling out of the top 50—”a disaster from which the law school would have a difficult time recovering,” he has said. The key point of his plan was the creation of scholarships to attract more high-qualified students, especially from Virginia. Butler had just put the plan in motion when the two donors entered the picture early this year. Their contribution will underwrite the scholarships Butler envisioned over the life of the grant, which is five years.
The dean thinks the school’s academic programs are sufficiently distinctive to create demand for a legal education at Scalia Law. Like other law schools, Scalia Law teaches first-year students the basics, among them torts, contracts, property, and civil procedure. But what’s notable about the school’s academic offerings are its “centers,” where specific topics and ideas are taught.
These centers reflect the school’s distinctive interests. There is a Law & Economics Center, a Global Antitrust Institute, the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, the Program on Economics and Privacy, and the Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Butler has entrusted these centers to a crop of energetic and increasingly prominent professors, including Todd Zywicki (Law & Economics), Adam Mossoff (Intellectual Property), and Neomi Rao (Administrative State). Another center is in the works, one on Liberty and Law.
The administrative law center, just six months old, is cutting a particularly significant new path. “Most schools that do administrative law relate it to environmental or financial services regulation,” says Butler. “I don’t know of anyone that takes our type of approach,” where administrative law is studied across a range of topics.
The Center for the Study of the Administrative State also addresses questions of constitutional and statutory interpretation, says Butler. They happen to be questions—for example, concerning what constitutes a lawful delegation of authority to an agency and to what extent courts should defer to an agency’s exercise of delegated power—that are now reaching courts with greater frequency.
Not incidentally, these are questions likely to interest the better-qualified student Scalia Law seeks to enroll in its quest to become one of the nation’s preeminent law schools.
Terry Eastland is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
