It’s been a banner year of hiring faculty for the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
Over the summer, the university hired Robert Chang, Andrew Gold, Susan McMahon and L. Song Richardson, former dean of the law school and chancellor’s professor of law, to the faculty for the fall semester.
Democratic Rep. Katie Porter is also set to rejoin the faculty in spring 2025 once her congressional term is complete in January, officials said.
Porter, who taught law at UCI for eight years, has been on a leave of absence since she was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.
“People have gone on to do great things, whether it’s leadership roles politically or in higher education, and they come back because they like that we have this distinct mission,” Dean Austen Parrish told the Business Journal.
Recruiting top faculty is among one of many priorities of Parrish, who was named the third ever dean of the law school in August 2022, succeeding Richardson.
Since taking over, UCI Law has partnered with nonprofits to create more scholarships for students and expanded its global study programs.
UCI Law currently has 59 full-time faculty members and 500 students.
Returning Dean Resigns as President
Richardson’s return to UCI comes after a three-year tenure as president of Colorado College.
Richardson became the first woman of color to lead the private liberal arts school in 2021 before announcing her resignation in February, citing difficulty balancing speaking out on issues with her responsibilities as president, according to her resignation statement.
“My legal and academic career has focused on the pursuit of equity and fairness,” Richardson wrote.
“As our national dialogue about these topics continues to intensify, I find myself increasingly torn between my desire to pursue that work as an academic with the freedom to fully engage in these debates, express my personal views and challenge the status quo, and my responsibilities to CC as president.”
She said she was stepping down as president to return to UCI to launch an institute “focused on equity, opportunity and leadership” sometime this year.
Prior to Colorado College, Richardson served as the second dean of UCI Law from 2018 to 2021.
At the time of her appointment, she was also the only woman of color to lead a top 30 law school ranked by U.S. News & World Report.
The school’s first dean was Erwin Chemerinsky, who now is the dean at University of California, Berkeley. Chemerinsky is scheduled to be the master of Ceremonies for the Business Journal’s annual General Counsel Awards, scheduled for Nov. 14 at the Irvine Marriott. Richardson’s not the only faculty returning to the law school.
Porter is also rejoining the faculty after losing the California Senate primary to Adam Schiff in March, failing to advance to the general election.
Regardless of people’s opinions on her politics, Parrish said that Porter’s known to be a “fabulous” teacher.
“I think students are going to be excited to have her teach courses and get some of the war stories from her time in Congress,” Parrish said.
Faculty Hires and Their Initiatives
Besides Richardson, the other three hires will also be starting their own initiatives and strengthening existing ones, Parrish said.
He described Chang as “one of the nation’s leading scholars in Asian American legal rights, race and law.”
Chang was recruited to serve as the executive director of the new Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality.
The center is named after civil rights activist Fred Korematsu, whose landmark 1944 lawsuit challenged the legality of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the internment as a military necessity. Its decision has been condemned over the years and was officially overturned in 2018.
The civil rights clinic will drive initiatives focused on research, advocacy and clinical education. Law students will be allowed to work on civil rights issues pending before state and federal courts.
Chang founded and directed the Korematsu Center in 2009 at the Seattle University School of Law.
Since its founding, the center has engaged in various local, regional and national issues. It challenged Arizona’s ethnic studies ban, application of the death penalty in Washington and the recission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
It successfully represented individuals affected by then President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban, drawing analogies from the Korematsu v. United States case in its argument “highlight[ing] the danger of using national security as a pretext for discriminatory policies.”
The Korematsu Center’s new home will be at UCI Law following an Oct. 22 launch event.
Gold, one of the other hires, will hold a courtesy joint appointment with the philosophy department at UCI’s School of Humanities. He will be the co-director of UCI’s Center for Legal Philosophy, which launched in 2017 as a joint endeavor between the humanities school and law school.
“Andrew Gold is a wonderful scholar in the area of legal philosophy and a does a lot in fiduciary rights,” Parrish said.
His research interests include law theory, fiduciary law and the law of corporations.
McMahon specializes in the field of legal writing and lawyering skills and will help further develop UCI Law’s lawyering skills program.
The program covers legal research, writing, oral advocacy and other important skills that lawyers need.
“She’s one of the top people in her field to join our program, which is already ranked one of the best lawyering skills programs in the country,” Parrish said.
Nonprofit and University Partnerships
UCI Law is partnering with nonprofits to help more first-generation and other underrepresented students afford a legal education.
UCI Law most recently announced a partnership with Point Foundation to provide scholarships up to $30,000 for students belonging to the LGBTQIA community.
This year, about 30% of UCI Law’s class of 2026 students identify as members of the LGBTQIA community, and over 25% of them identify as first-generation college students, according to officials.
Point Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit, is known as the largest scholarship fund for LGBTQ students.
The law school is also making inroads internationally.
It has entered agreements with Korea University, Seoul National University and Yonsei University for global study programs.
The goal of these partnerships is to not only to attract students from outside the U.S. but also expose UCI students to the legal profession in other countries, Parrish said.
“You have to have some idea, if you’re practicing at the top of your field, as to what’s happening more broadly,” he said. “Even for somebody who’s not going to practice in that area, having that broader world view is useful just to become a more sophisticated attorney and understand the context in which trends are occurring.”
UCI Law raised about $4 million last year and plans to raise more this year to put towards scholarships, obtaining more faculty chairs and its various programs and clinics.
In August, the law school welcomed around 170 new Juris Doctor students and 50 graduate students for the 2024-2025 academic year.
