Law School Undertakes $15 Million Expansion Drive

The Harvard Law School will undertake a $15 million fund raising campaign to support a major expansion of buildings, Faculty, courses, and research.

The expansion will include the construction of Faculty office wing to Langdell Hall and a new classroom building between, Wyeth Hall and Langdell's International Legal Studies wing.

Funds will also finance an additional 11 to 15 faculty members to expand research and graduate study. Special emphasis will be placed on strengthening urban legal studies, criminal law and criminology, and foreign legal systems.

Three-and-a-Half-Year Study

The comprehensive program is the result of more than three-and-a-half-years of study by a seventeen Planning and Development Committee, chaired of Albert M. Sacks, professor of Law. The fund drive can finance their recommendations will end in 1967.

The Faculty wing will cost about $750,000. It will contain 24 new offices for the Faculty, as well as research offices, conference rooms, and a Faculty library and lounge.

The new class room building will eliminate the "unhappy distortions in many students' schedules," which result from the narrow range in size of the seven existing classrooms. The increased number of small courses' has meant that classes of 30 students sometimes occupy rooms which hold 160 and more. The new building will have at least two rooms to accommodate up to 75 students in addition to seminar rooms and larger lecture halls.

The committee also suggested that the admissions, financial aid, and dormatory and placement offices be moved from their present quarters--a frame house on Everett St.--to the new classroom building. The Everett St. House would become apartments for visiting scholars, temporary appointees, and guests of the Law School. In addition, an entry in one of the dorms will probably be for foreign students and American students interested in international law.

Recommending a "significant change in usual law school practice," the Committee asked that many of the new faculty members concentrate in research and the training of graduate lawyers.

A new Program in Urban Legal Studies will be established to treat the law's relation to housing, health, education, crime, recreation, and other similar areas. Two chairs of professors in Urban Legal Studies will be endowed at a cost of $1 million. The Committee asked $50,000 a year to bring eight to ten graduate lawyers to work in this area. Administrative expenses and the cost of supporting a number of other research fellows brings the total program's total budget to $2,250,000 over a ten year period.

Studies in Criminal Law will have two endowed chairs and about four graduate fellowships which would go to doctoral candidates specializing in, criminal law.

The Law School plans to have four new chairs endowed in the field of foreign and comparative law. Harold J. Berman, professor of Law and Arthur T. von Mehren '43, professor of Law, may receive two of these.