If all goes as planned, students at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law could be attending classes at the Downtown campus by the 2016-17 academic year.
According to the current plans, the Arizona Center for Law and Society will be located between First and Second streets just south of Taylor Place, said Rick Naimark, deputy city manager for Phoenix.
“The campus has already begun to alter the landscape of downtown,” he said.
Naimark said the law school will be good for downtown because it will help continue to create a vibrant, 24-hour community.
“It really fills out the campus footprint,” Naimark said.
The new location for the law school will also bring more graduate students Downtown than the campus has previously hosted.
In order to get the process started, ASU President Michael Crow included the goal in ASU’s Capital Improvement Plan. It was then proposed to the Arizona Board of Regents, which still need to approve the decision.
The issue is scheduled to go before the Phoenix City Council in December.
Earlier this month, a City Council subcommittee recommended the city enter into an agreement with the Board of Regents for the project’s development.
The city would contribute about $12 million to the $120 million project, Naimark said.
The Arizona Center for Law and Society will be more than just a law school, said Douglas Sylvester, dean of the College of Law.
“It will allow us to engage the city of Phoenix and the Valley in a new way,” Sylvester said. “It is great for students and great for the community.”
Students at the College of Law are already engaged with the community. Sylvester said students provide 100,000 hours of free legal services per year, worth about $10 million.
Naimark said the new building would expand the scope of ASU facilities for conferences and continuing legal education.
“The facility is anticipated to be about 250,000 to 300,000 square feet with underground parking,” Naimark said. It would cover about three-fourths of the city block.
“The downtown Phoenix campus is unique,” said Christopher Callahan, dean of the Cronkite School and vice provost of the Downtown campus. “It was designed to bring programs that can take advantage of being in the heart of downtown Phoenix.”
Sylvester said moving the law school downtown makes sense because “it will bring students closer to where legal practice occurs.”
“Moving downtown would do for the O’Connor School what it did for Cronkite,” Callahan said.
The Cronkite School moved to downtown Phoenix in 2008, bringing students closer to major internships and news organizations than any other journalism school in the country, Callahan said.
The programs currently offered at the Downtown campus are more professionally oriented.
“I would envision joint programs,” Callahan said. There are already joint programs between schools, but Callahan said bringing the law school Downtown will add to those opportunities.
“I could see all sorts of new collaboration between schools downtown,” he said.
Contact the reporter at aubree.abril@asu.edu
