Maggie's Farm

I went to Georgia State Law School, which is not much more than twenty-five years old. When I started there the school was well known and well regarded in Georgia, the larger Atlanta area especially. Outside the state nobody knew anything about it. For instance, my brother was practicing law in South Carolina when I started, and he had never heard of it.

I intended to go to the University of Georgia Law School, but after checking out Georgia State Law I was sufficiently impressed to go there instead.*

By the time I graduated the school had started to get some national attention; now it's gotten a lot tougher to get into.

What the school did when it was established was spend its money mostly on the faculty. They wanted to hire the best teaching professors they could get, and I understand that they offered pretty attractive salaries to reel the talent in.

What it did not spend money on was facilities. When I was there in the early 00's the school was jammed into the bottom few floors of the "Urban Life Building", an ugly brown-brick travesty of ill-considered 1970's architecture. A real brick scat-pile. The classrooms weren't fancy at all, though a number of them had recently been wired for computers (no Wifi, then, though) and some audio visual equipment.

The school's only now planning to build it's own dedicated facility. Point is, the founders knew that the school's academic worth and reputation was going to be generated by the performance of its graduates and the quality of its teachers. So they focused on the culture rather than the perks and it paid off. Atlanta law firms soon realized that they could hire excellent new attorneys from a local school.

Of course, at the outset the school was also working on a shoestring budget, so they couldn't afford much in the way of fancy anyhow. But they put the money into what mattered most.

*What really convinced me to go to Georgia State was that it offered a part-time program and night classes, even though I intended to go full time. Median student age was twenty-eight. At UGA Law it was twenty-two or three. I was thirty. I didn't really want to move to Athens and find myself surrounded at school by a bunch of callow wet-eared youths freshly graduated from partying all the time. Oh and it was cheap - outside housing arrangements the basic tuition was four thousand whole dollars a year. Tuition for three years at State was cheaper than one year at, say, Emory Law, or Mercer down in Macon.