UC Irvine Law School

University of California, Irvine School of Law
UCI School of Law building
Parent school	University of California, Irvine
Established	2008
School type	Public
Parent endowment	$ 504.3 million
Dean	Erwin Chemerinsky
Location	Irvine, California, US
Enrollment	338
Faculty	81
USNWR ranking	28
Bar pass rate	79.8%
Website	www.law.uci.edu

The University of California, Irvine School of Law is the law school at the University of California, Irvine. It is the fifth law school in the UC system and the first public law school to open in California in 40 years. In September 2007, Erwin Chemerinsky was named as the law school's first dean.

Initially, it was announced that the school would be named for Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company, in honor of his $20 million donation towards its founding. In 2008 an agreement was reached between Bren and UCI that the school would not bear his name. Chemerinsky said, "We are deeply grateful for the Bren gift, but it was decided between the chancellor and Mr. Bren that our name should be parallel to other UC schools."

In the summer of 2011, the American Bar Association granted the school provisional accreditation. As law schools need to exist for two years before being granted provisional accreditation, this was the earliest point at which the school could become accredited. The school was granted full accreditation in June, 2014.

In 2010, University of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter, in his "Leiter Law School Rankings", ranked the UC Irvine faculty 9th in the nation in terms of scholarly impact. In 2012, Professor Gregory Sisk and his colleagues in the library of St. Thomas Law School in Minnesota prepared a new scholarly impact study, using the same methodology as Leiter's 2010 study and with Leiter consulting. The 2012 study calculated scholarly impact in terms of citations by full-time teaching faculty over the period from 2007 through 2011, and ranked the UC Irvine Law School faculty as 7th, up two places from the 2010 ranking.

In September of 2015, Sisk updated the rankings to include data from 2010-2014. Based on this new data, UC Irvine was ranked 6th in the nation.

UC Irvine's student-faculty ratio is 7.3 to 1, making it one of the best ratios among all law schools in the country.

Dean Chemerinsky set the goal of placing UCI Law in the top 20 from the first time the school was ranked. To help attract the highest quality students, the school offered full scholarships for all members of its inaugural class. Over 2,700 applications were received to join the inaugural class yet only 4% were accepted. Classes officially began for the first class of students on August 24, 2009. The school's inaugural class was composed of 34 females and 26 males with a median LSAT of 167 and median undergraduate GPA of 3.61.