Northeastern University School of Law was founded by the Boston
Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in 1898 as the first evening law program in the city. At the time, only two law schools were in the Boston area and the time-honored practice of reading law in the office of an established lawyer was losing its effectiveness. An advisory committee, consisting of
James Barr Ames, dean of the
Harvard Law School; Samuel Bennett, dean of the
Boston University School of Law; and Massachusetts Judge James R. Dunbar, was formed to assist with the formation of the evening law program. The program was incorporated as an
LL.B.-granting law school, the Evening School of Law of Boston YMCA, in 1904. In its early days, the school "saw itself as the working man's alternative to the elite schools" and "boasted of being 'An Evening Law School with Day School Standards,'" using the
case method of teaching, according to legal historian
Robert Stevens. In April 1953, Northeastern President
Carl Ell announced that the law school would close. He cited the number of other law schools that had sprung up elsewhere in the city. Meanwhile, enrollment at Northeastern law school had plummeted, from 1,328 students in 1937-38 to 196 students in that year. The school's building and library on
Mt. Vernon Street in
Beacon Hill was eventually sold. Alumni - who composed one-fourth of Massachusetts's Superior Court judges as well as many District Court judges - worked to reestablish the law school in 1966, based upon the university's signature cooperative, or co-op, education model. Thomas J. O'Toole, a Harvard Law graduate, was selected as the school's dean in 1967. In 1970, Gryzmish Hall on
Huntington Avenue was dedicated, which would later become part the Asa S. Knowles Center for Law. Despite the school's working-class origins, rigorous new admissions policies resulted in a small student body of 125 students who nearly all came from financially well-off families and upper-echelon undergraduate colleges. Still, half of those admitted as first-year students were women. Over the ensuing decades, students worked in co-ops all over North America, led by a contingent in Alaska. A number of graduates practicing law as varied as Native American land claims in rural Maine; assisting migrant farm laborers in east Texas; at the Moscow, Russia office of Baker & McKenzie; the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees in New Delhi; and countless legal services offices. In 1968, O'Toole, explaining the school's dedication to public interest law, told a
Boston Globe reporter that "law schools are still teaching lawyers as if they were all going out to be corporation lawyers on Wall Street...(but) the big demand for lawyers today is in the field of public affairs in government, and in dealing with basic human problems, and no law school today seems to be training lawyers for those jobs." ==Campus==