Want an inside tour of the Law School?

Tonya Smith, Communications Director at the UALR Bowen School of Law, passed on these images.

Photo credits go to Dero Sanford.

The William H. Bowen School of Law is part of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and was established in 1975. The law school is public, and has approximately 450 law students enrolled in full-time and part-time divisions.

The Law Library at Bowen, with its breathtaking four-story atrium and reading room, occupies 52,000 square feet of space located on four floors of the Law School building.

The law school’s current campus is located adjacent to MacArthur Park, near the Arkansas Center for Fine Arts. The building was originally built for the medical school of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, which moved to its current campus in the central part of Little Rock in 1956. The current building was extensively renovated in 1992.

The Princeton Review ranked the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law among the nation’s top law schools. The law school is one of 117 profiled in a recently-published book, “Best 117 Law Schools.” It ranked 10th in the category “Most Welcoming of Older Students.”

Among the school’s distinctions:

• National Jurist magazine listed the Bowen School as one of the top 50 law schools in clinical legal education in its September 2008 issue.
• U.S. News and World Report last April ranked the Bowen School among the top 20 law schools in the nation in the specialty of legal writing.
• The school received a $1 million gift last May from former dean and namesake William H. Bowen and his wife, Connie, to use for new opportunities and to react to critical short-term needs.
• Unlike most law schools, UALR requires two “lawyering skills” courses during the second year to teach skills used in trial advocacy, interviewing and counseling, mediation and negotiation.
• The law school offers three clinical programs: the litigation clinic, where students represent actual clients in court; the mediation clinic, where students gain practical experience in alternative dispute resolution; and the tax clinic, where students represent actual clients who have controversies with the Internal Revenue Service.
• The school offers externship programs, where students can learn and work in legal settings, for judges, legal services providers and legislators, earning academic credit.
• UALR Bowen School graduates include U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder; Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel; Arkansas Speaker of the House Robbie Wills; Reps. John Edwards, Dan Greenberg, Bruce Maloch, and Robert Moore Jr. and Steve Harrelson. Bowen School alumni are also members of the federal and state judiciaries, partners in major law firms, Fortune 500 counsel, and dedicated public servants.