CU mission not so impossible: Raise up to $10 million to help fund new law school building

BOULDER — If the holidays haven’t soaked up all your spare cash, Fleming Law School Dean Harold Bruff wants to talk to you.

Bruff is on a mission, aiming to raise $7 million to $10 million to help fund a new law school building for University of Colorado at Boulder. The school estimates total cost for a new building to be $36 million, with the state picking up the bulk of the tab.

“We’re working with our best friends, and nobody has popped out a check yet,” says Bruff, “but we’ve got them thinking it over.” He says the state Legislature won’t approve public funding for the building until private donations are in place.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Select your Republic Services residential cart now!

In preparation for Republic Services becoming the primary provider of residential recycling, yard trimmings, and trash, residents should now select the best cart size and service schedule for their household needs.

In 1996, the school commissioned studies to determine the future needs of the law facility. What resulted were reports that said the 40-year-old Fleming Law Building should be replaced.

For Bruff, there are many reasons to replace Fleming.

“There’s a severe space shortage,” he says. “It’s worst in the library, but it’s bad everywhere.”

Another reason for replacement — infrastructure for modern technology, such as the wiring required by today’s computers and the climate control systems they require to function, simply won’t fit into a building built in the 1950s, Bruff believes. Finally, Bruff says the building’s limitations lead to “general inefficiency.”

“When you live in a building this long and have to patch, patch, patch, you find you’re not using rooms for what they were designed for. You’re sticking walls in here and there, so you’ve lost efficiency just through erosion.”

After studying the feasibility of moving the law school off campus or expanding the existing site, Bruff says it was decided a new building was the best solution. CU regents have signed off on the plan, and the push for a new facility enjoys faculty and student support.

Others outside the CU law community think new facilities are needed, too; they’re just less diplomatic about it.

The Princeton Review of the Best Law Schools says CU has “uncomfortable, dark and poorly maintained” facilities that could use a major overhaul.

The American Bar Association’s Accreditation Committee isn’t much nicer. It says “the present inadequacy of the physical space available for the law school has a negative and material effect on the education students receive.”

A new site has been selected for the new building, and blueprints are in place describing what it will look like, says David Geches, a professor of natural resources law at CU and chairman of the building committee. Tennis courts to the south the Fleming building will give way to the new building, to be built near the intersection of Broadway and Baseline. The building’s architecture will be consistent with that of the rest of the Boulder’s Italian Renaissance-style campus. The structure will be about 108,000 square feet.

That represents a sorely needed increase of 30,000 square feet, says Geches, meaning more space for the law library, classrooms, student and faculty offices, and meeting areas.

“It’s a very attractive building,” Geches says, though he admits “it’s probably going to suit us for 10 years.” The library is designed so that it can be expanded as needed, he adds.

Perhaps no one is more excited at the prospect of a new law school building than the school’s students.

Tim Pollard, a third-year student and president of the Student Bar Association at CU, says crowding at Fleming has meant that 22 student groups share four eight-by-eight cubicles. During finals, “there’s not enough space to sit” in the library. Outside the library, says Pollard, there’s one study room that can hold 12 people — for a student body numbering 500.

Students have not only voiced their desire for a new building; they’ve backed their pleas with cold, hard cash. Pollard says in 1996 students voted overwhelmingly to raise their own tuition by $1,000 a year to help fund improvements at the law school, including a new building.

“The students wholeheartedly support this,” he says, adding that the vote won by a 7-to-1 margin. Student funds devoted to the project will guarantee about a quarter of the bonds issued to finance the building.

Pollard is hopeful a target opening date for the new law school building, some time in August of 2002, can be met. Many obstacles remain, but if the process continues as it has, Pollard thinks the deadline is realistic. So does Bruff, who hopes he can cut a ribbon on a new facility and welcome a new crop of CU law students to a state-of-the-art law school that year.

Both Bruff and Geches think rankings given CU’s law school by publications like U.S. New & World Report should improve as its physical plant improves. Both, though, are careful to point out a hoped-for ratings spike is not what’s driving the push for a new building.

“We really have a first-rate group of students here,” says Geches, “and I think that we owe our students, most of whom come from Colorado, facilities that will come closer to matching their qualifications and presenting them with a legal education that takes advantage of modern technology and library resources.”

He adds, “If things aren’t good now, how are they going to be in seven or eight years?”