A Brief History
Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, founded in 1897 as the Cleveland Law School, was the first law school in Ohio to admit women and one of the first to admit minorities. In 1946 the Cleveland Law School merged with the John Marshall School of Law, founded in 1916, to become the Cleveland-Marshall Law School. In 1969, the Law School joined Cleveland’s new public university as its sixth college and was renamed the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law of Cleveland State University. In the past 110 years, 13 men have served as dean of the law school.
Because egalitarianism was a motivating principle of the law school’s founders, the early school’s student population was remarkable in its diversity. Many of the men and women who studied in the new law college were immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants; many were older students and persons of color, and most worked throughout the day while studying law at night.
A number of the law school’s earliest alumni and alumnae had notable careers, including the Honorable Genevieve Cline ’21, the first woman in America appointed to a federal court; the Honorable Mary Grossman ‘12, the first woman in America elected to a municipal court bench; the Honorable Carl B. Stokes ’56, the first African American mayor of a major American city (Cleveland); the Honorable Louis Stokes ’53, Ohio’s first African American Congressman; and Cleveland Mayor, five-term Ohio Governor and two-term U.S. Senator, the Honorable Frank Lausche ‘21, son of Slovenian immigrants. Other graduates left their imprint in large and small ways in the local history books as influential attorneys, judges, public servants and leaders in commerce and industry. Cleveland-Marshall graduates laid the foundation of the legal profession in Northeast Ohio and shaped the future of our region as surely as the early explorers who mapped the outlines of the Western Reserve.
Accredited by the American Bar Association in 1957 and accepted into the Association of American Law Schools in 1969, the law school offers JD and LLM degrees and five dual degrees (JD/MBA, JD/MPA, JD/MUPPD, JD/MAES, JD/MSES). Fifty full-time faculty members teach approximately 700 students in a well-developed and comprehensive curriculum. Cleveland-Marshall students receive experiential training in four legal clinics: the Employment Law Clinic, the Housing Law Clinic, the Urban Development Law Clinic and the Environmental Law Clinic. And they receive on-site legal training in externships in federal and state appellate courts and in the offices of the Federal Public Defender and the United States Attorney or in a faculty-approved Independent Internship; they edit two journals, the Cleveland State Law Review and the Journal of Law and Health, and participate successfully in moot court competitions throughout the country. Cleveland-Marshall students may chose a subject-specific curriculum through the law school’s concentrations in Employment and Labor Law, Business Law, Criminal Law, Tax Law, and Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution. Moreover, Cleveland-Marshall students are learning the lawyer’s responsibility to the community through countless volunteer opportunities in the law school’s Pro Bono Program. University faculty, students, graduates and members of the bench and bar study and research in one of the country’s finest law libraries: the $18-million Cleveland-Marshall Law Library, which houses the state’s second largest legal collection and all major on-line resources. In the summer of 2007, renovations began on the law school building. By the end of the spring 2008 semester the entire law school will have a new, light-filled interior and a three-tiered glass façade opening on to Euclid Avenue, Cleveland’s historic main street. Today, 10,000 living Cleveland-Marshall alumni and alumnae serve on the judiciary at every level, head law firms, chair corporations and not-for-profit organizations, hold high office in state and federal governments, and contribute substantially to the region’s and the nation’s economic and social wellbeing.