When 52 students graduate today , Florida International University thinks its law school will go a good way toward proving its case.
The first graduating class is more than half minorities, bearing out the university’s argument that it would do more than most law schools to diversify the profession. State and national lawyers’ groups see that as a priority.
Graduates such as Katena Roberts back up another FIU claim: that the relatively low tuition at South Florida’s only state law school would enable students to plan careers around public service, rather than hefty loan payments. Roberts starts work at the Palm Beach County Public Defender’s office in August.
The fledgling FIU College of Law can boast competitiveness, not just social purpose. About 1,500 people applied for 110 seats in the fall class. The average incoming student outscored close to two-thirds of other would-be lawyers on the standardized Law School Admissions Test. Some of FIU’s students have beaten counterparts from such big-name schools as Georgetown in competitions that simulate trials, according to FIU law dean Leonard Strickman.
“The people who said there was no need for public legal education in South Florida, I think, have been demonstrated to have been wrong,” he says.
When state legislators agreed in 2000 to underwrite new law schools at FIU and Florida A&M; University, there were plenty of skeptics. There still are some.
Some legislators said the state didn’t need more lawyers. About 1 in every 230 Floridians is an lawyer, compared to about 1 in 400 nationally.
And the law school is a significant public expense. The state pays $7.5 million a year to make up for a fairly low full-time tuition of about $8,000 a year, about $1,000 less than the average public law school and $17,000 less than the average private one, according to the American Bar Association. The state also is pitching in $31 million for a building set to break ground today.
“We’ve got enough law schools in the state of Florida to produce enough lawyers to make society work,” says state Sen. Walter “Skip” Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale, a lawyer himself. “I think it was a waste of money. But it’s done, and I wish them the best.”
FIU argued that while Florida may have plenty of lawyers, it has too few in public service, and too few prepared to serve a public with sizable numbers of minorities and immigrants. Minorities make up 37 percent of Florida’s population, but only 11 percent of its lawyers, according to census estimates and the Florida Bar Association.
A state-subsidized law school at a mostly-minority university could help, FIU said.
But the Florida Bar Association said the state could help more by boosting minority law scholarships, which instead were cut to help pay for the FIU and FAMU law schools.
The head of a major Miami law firm initially suggested FIU’s law school wasn’t helping enough. Steel, Hector & Davis chairman Joseph P. Klock Jr. expressed disappointment with the diversity of the first class, given Miami-Dade County’s demographics. Hispanics, blacks and other national minorities together make up more than 80 percent of the county, but about 55 percent of the class.
FIU and Florida’s other public universities are barred from considering race in admissions decisions, but they can recruit with an eye toward diversity. Strickman, the law school dean, says the school is working hard at recruitment and getting results, with an incoming class that is about 41 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 3 percent other minorities.
The progress has impressed Klock, who now praises the school for “doing its part to lead in this area.
“They need to be congratulated and encouraged to do more of the same,” he wrote in an e-mail on Friday.
To be sure, FIU’s law school is unusually diverse for a field in which almost 80 percent of students are white. In fact, U.S News & World Report has proclaimed FIU the second-most diverse law school in the country, after Texas Southern.
But Roberts, the new graduate, prized the school as much for its unity as for its diversity.
Its size meant plenty of time with professors. One even helped Roberts figure out a real-estate-law problem of her own.
Its newness meant lots of room to make a mark. Roberts competed on two moot-court teams and helped found the campus chapter of the Stonewall Legal Alliance, part of a gay law students association.
“The biggest thing, for me is that we [students] really are all friends,” said Roberts, 26, of West Palm Beach. “Not that it isn’t competitive, but it’s competitive while being supportive.
“Your friends encourage you to do well. And they still try their damnedest to do better than you.”
For more information on the FIU College of Law, see or call 305-348-8006.
Jennifer Peltz can be reached at or 561-243-6636.
Diversity in law
Florida International University’s law students are more diverse than Florida lawyers or U.S. law students in general.
Total Hispanic Black Asian/
minorities other
FIU law school 57% 43% 10% 4%
Florida lawyers 11% 8% 2% 1%
U.S. law students 21% 6% 7% 8%
SOURCES: Florida International University, Florida Bar Association, American Bar Association
