McGeorge School of Law has a new dean just in time for classes to start. Michael Hunter Schwartz joined the University of the Pacific faculty earlier this month, taking over for outgoing dean Francis J. Mootz, III. He previously served as dean and law professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
He makes his debut on Insight to talk about the state of legal education, the challenges behind improving a law school, and how law schools can better prepare students for passing the bar and serving their community through the practice of law.
Schwartz acknowledges the challenges facing McGeorge and law schools around the country.
"Well, I think what's really happened at McGeorge is that we've made a very deliberate choice to shrink our size," Schwartz says. "And so, there was a time when McGeorge had as many as eleven-hundred students, and right now we're more like five-or-six-hundred."
Schwartz says the nationwide pool of students applying to law school shrank by nearly half, from about 100,000 in 2004 to 52,000 in 2016.
