Beginnings Notre Dame Law School opened in February 1869. It was the second Catholic law school opened in the United States, and the oldest in continuous operation. The first was the
Saint Louis University School of Law, which opened in 1843 but closed soon after in 1847 (it was then re-opened in 1908). This became the Law School's home until its eventual relocation. The building later served the Architecture Department, the Psychology Department, and, since 1976, the Music Department as Crowley Hall. In 1921
Maxine Evelyn Ryer became the first woman to study law at Notre Dame and the first woman to practice law in
St. Joseph County, Indiana. In 1925 John Whitman was appointed by Dean
Thomas Konop as the first Law School librarian, and the collection grew to 7,000 volumes in 1944, as part of a campus beautification projects, statues by
Eugene Kormendi were added to Hoynes Hall.
20th century On October 7, 1930, the Law School was transferred to the new building located on Notre Dame Avenue. The Gothic building, which still stands today, has a large reading room. The second librarian, Lora Lashbrook, and the third, Marie Lawrence, grew the library's collection to 20,000 volumes by 1952, and 55,000 volumes by 1960. The increase of both the library collection and student population reduced the available space. Regardless, this was balanced by the expansion of the law school funded by a donation from
S. S. Kresge, the namesake of the Kresge Law Library. Under the guidance of Dean Lawless the school started one of the nation's first programs allowing law students to study abroad, with a year-long program in London to study the roots of
common law. In 1986 a further expansion added the East Reading Room and created the reference librarian offices. In 1990 alumnus
John F. Sandner donated funding for the acquisition of the entire 120,000 volume collection of the
Chicago Bar Association Library. In 1970,
Graciela Olivarez became the first woman and Latina to graduate from Notre Dame Law School. The next class to graduate women would be 1973.
21st-century New resources for scholarship In 2004, the Kresge Law Library became one of the few academic law libraries to own more than 600,000 volumes. This was accomplished mainly under the tenure of the fifth law librarian, Roger Jacobs, who also served as head librarian of the Library of the
United States Supreme Court. Between 2007 and 2008, a new building, the Eck Hall of Law, was constructed to provide the Law School with an additional 85,000 square feet of classroom and office space. In 2010
Robert Biolchini, alumnus and entrepreneur from
Tulsa, Oklahoma, funded the renovation of the Kresge Law Library, located in the renamed Biolchini Hall of Law. The renovated Biolchini Hall is 106,500 square feet, has two 50-seat classrooms, a seminar room, 29 group study rooms, and holds 300,000 book volumes and more than 300,000 volumes in microfilm. The total cost of renovations and expansions was approximately 58 million dollars.
Faculty hiring momentum In recent years, the expanding Notre Dame Law faculty has attracted several accomplished scholars from other top law schools. In 2009,
University of Virginia Law School Professor Stephen Smith left a tenured position to join the Notre Dame Law faculty. In 2012, Professor Barry Cushman, the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Virginia, joined the ND Law faculty. In 2017, it was announced that private law theorist Paul Miller from
McGill University would join the Notre Dame faculty. Samuel Bray, a remedies theorist previously teaching at
UCLA law, joined the faculty in 2018. During the same period, long-time Notre Dame professors have been invited for visiting faculty positions at Harvard, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago law schools.
Expanded urban presence in DC and Chicago In 2013, new space was secured for the
Notre Dame Law in Chicago program, which allows ND Law students to pursue their studies from an urban campus in downtown Chicago ("in the Loop"). In 2015, in partnership with
Kirkland & Ellis, the law school debuted its
Notre Dame Law in DC program, which allows students to spend a semester studying in Washington, DC. In recent years, the school has hosted talks and events by many prominent legal figures, including
Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
Antonin Scalia,
Clarence Thomas,
Samuel Alito,
Sonia Sotomayor,
William Barr,
Brett Kavanaugh, and
Amy Coney Barrett.
Deans • 1883–1919:
William J. Hoynes • 1918–1923: Francis J. Vurpillat • 1923–1941:
Thomas F. Konop • 1941–1952:
Clarence Manion • 1952–1968: Joseph O'Meara • 1968–1971: William B. Lawless Jr. • 1971–1975:
Thomas L. Shaffer • 1975–1999: David T. Link • 1999–2009: Patricia A. O'Hara • 2009–2019:
Nell Jessup Newton • 2019–Present:
G. Marcus Cole ==Admissions and rankings==