Law Schools

Berkeley Law School Is On Its Way To Purging 'Boalt' References

A law school by any other name would smell as prestigious...

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A committee at University of California Berkeley Law School had been given the chance to look into the troubling legacy of Nevada attorney and mining industry baron John Henry Boalt, for whom the law school building was named. More than just a building, Boalt Hall was also used for years as a stand-in for the law school’s name, and alumni refer to themselves as “Boalties,” so considering renaming the buildings strikes deep in the heart of the Berkeley Law identity. But as Berkeley Law professor Charles P. Reichmann noted in an op-ed last year, Boalt was a racist who was instrumental in legislation that halted Chinese immigration to California and he mused about the need to “exterminate” other races:

Boalt prospered in California and soon was president of the Bohemian Club. In 1877, Boalt delivered an influential address, “The Chinese Question,” at the Berkeley Club. He argued that never before in history have two non-assimilating races lived in harmony unless one enslaved the other. That the Chinese could never assimilate was self-evident to Boalt: Americans look at the Chinese with “an unconquerable repulsion which it seems to me must ever prevent any intimate association or miscegenation of the races.” Boalt invoked the alleged criminality, intellectual differences, cruelty and inhumanity of the Chinese, and mused it would be better to “exterminate” a strongly dissimilar race than assimilate it.

That’s… same bad mojo right there.

The law school has already done away with using the name Boalt Hall in branding in order to minimize confusion, particularly outside of California. But now the committee that was charged with looking into the use of Boalt’s name has recommended taking his name off the building as well.

As noted by Charles Cannon, Berkeley Law’s senior assistant dean and chief administrative officer and chair of the committee looking at the use of the Boalt name, the recommendation doesn’t necessarily mean removing all Boalt references, as some are required by the terms of the endowment and named after John’s wife, Elizabeth:

He says the group determined that the original Boalt Hall name was philanthropic based on the gift, but when the law school moved to a new building in 1950, Boalt was part of honorific naming.

After her death in 1917, Elizabeth Boalt’s estate created two endowed faculty chairs, and there appears to be requirements to keep the Boalt name associated with those, Cannon says.

Results of a school survey reveal that while the Berkeley Law community is spilt on the issue, 47 percent agree the name should be struck from campus:

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In considering the Boalt name, the school surveyed 2,000 people with Berkeley Law connections. Of those, 47 percent were in favor of striking any campus reference to the name Boalt, 33 percent were in favor of keeping the Boalt name association and 11 percent supported changing the name reference to Elizabeth Boalt. The remainder of respondents expressed other opinions, Cannon says.

Perhaps that is not surprising as the campus is 18.4 percent Asian-American:

“Given the makeup of the student body, this is a demeaning name to bear,” Cannon says.

After the controversy over Stanford’s name and with what happened with Harvard Law’s crest, we have to ask, is there a T14 law school that doesn’t owe its soul to a scumbag? Hell, even the seemingly generically named New York University School of Law is tied at its core to Samuel Tilden, the presidential candidate who promised an end to Reconstruction. He ultimately lost — despite winning the popular vote — in exchange for a promise that the Hayes administration would start the process of Republicans pissing on Lincoln’s legacy that continues to this day. I mean, you have to go down the rankings a bunch to find the Brandeises and the Cardozos. But longevity is an established essential element for a law school’s legitimacy and prestige. When you look too far into the past — especially if you’re only concerned with the white men who held power — you’re bound to come away with quite a bit of racism on your hands.

The committee’s recommendation is not yet finalized. Public comment is opened until the end of next month, then Dean Erwin Chemerinsky will decide if they should apply to dename Boalt Hall. The matter then gets sent to the UC Berkeley chancellor and the UC system president, with the UC Regents having final approval.

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Read the committee’s full recommendation below.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”https://abovethelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Boalt_Name_Committee_Report_06.2018b.pdf”]

headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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