The Architecture of Legal Education
posted by Nate Oman
My father is an art historian, and as a child he literally read me books about architecture as bed-time stories. Wild individualist that I am, I gave up on my childhood ambition to become an architect and went to law school. Still, childhood teachings never leave us, and I can’t help but being an architecture snob, indeed something of an architecture reactionary. (My father is a huge fan of Ruskin.) Not surprisingly, I love William & Mary. Indeed, I think that our College has one of the half-dozen or so most beautiful campuses in America. The so-called “Ancient Campus” around the Wren Building boasts some of the oldest academic architecture in North America. (As always, William & Mary and Harvard debate whose buildings are older, a question complicated by fires and moves.) Even the newer part of campus is not that bad. Like most schools, William & Mary expanded when the Baby Boomers went to college, and among the other pernicious effects of that generation was a massive academic building boom right at the aesthetic nadir of Western architecture. In Williamsburg, however, conservatism (if not anachronism) and snobbery in the main carried the day, and the buildings of the 1960s and 1970s are not nearly as hideous as they could be. All and all, it is a good place for an architectural reactionary to work.
Unless, of course, you are a law professor. The Marshall-Wythe School of Law, alas, partakes of essentially none of the main campus’s architectural charm. We are located four or five blocks away from the main campus in a nondescript building begun in the 1970s, which can only garner the faint praise that it is not as ugly as it could have been. It occurs to me that many of the realities of American legal education get played out in the architecture of law schools. William & Mary is certainly not alone in locating its law school away from the main campus. The geographic distance reflects both the intellectual distance — we’re a professional school, law is its own arcane branch of knowledge — and the intellectual anxieities — we aren’t quite taken seriously as real academics, our discipline isn’t sufficiently integrated with others, etc. It also reflects the history and economics of legal education. The law school used to be located on the main quad at William & Mary in cramped quarters in one of the old academic halls. The new building far from the campus represented the economic coming of age of the school and the independence from domination by the central administration. It is the architectural manifestation of the same forces that give me a more comfortable salary than my friends in the government or history departments.
I am curious about law schools without the architectural distance between law and the rest of the campus. Wisconsin comes to mind. Does a physical location at the heart of the University make any intellectual or symbolic difference? Wisconsin, of course, has a tradition of social scientific approaches to the law. Maybe we got Stewart Macauly because of the architecture.
January 9, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Posted in: Architecture, Law School
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Responses (4)
Frank - January 9, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Aesthetically, I love the whole wood paneling, Persian rug, colonial Williamsburg thing. But I also think my firm in DC was a bit more “honest” about its place in the world given its spare, glass/stone/steel approach.
My law school home (SHLS), located in an office building near a train station, manages at once to be starkly utilitarian and yet to accommodate some aesthetic ideals (with lots of sunlight in the atrium and visiting art exhibits).
Finally, I must recommend Alain de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness for anyone interested in the topic.
Rick Garnett - January 9, 2007 at 8:12 pm
The law building at Notre Dame is smack-dab in the middle of the campus, and has — like much of the campus in that sector — the collegiate-Gothic thing going. This is, I think, a good thing. That said, many of the faculty believe that the law school would be better off in a satellite (i.e., “with parking”) location.
Matt - January 9, 2007 at 8:17 pm
While Penn’s law school isn’t exactly in the ‘heart’ of campus it could perhaps be described in the lungs or perhaps the liver. It’s certainly closer to the heart than is, say, the Wharton Death Star building or the chemistry department. It’s also got some nice architecture and some bad parts. There is a fair amount of internaction w/ the philosophy dept., urban studies, Wharton, and others. I don’t know of the proximity causes this but it surely makes it easier than it would be at, say, Georgetown or George Mason or somewhere like that.
mlr - January 10, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I recall during the Duke Law rennovation a quote along the lines of the building looked like a high school on the outskirt of the campus. Now the law school blends the aesthtic charm of the West Campus (Gothic Stone) with the an architecture that seems to suggest its visionary and clean. Its a very nice combo.
As to the question at hand, the Law school sits with a grouping of the other professional schools, down the way from the Business school, and across the street from Public Policy and Environmental Sciences and is not in the center of the quad; however, given the possible locations that the law School could have ended up at, its closer than say the undergrad east campus and reasonably close to the pulse of the University.
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