USC Gould School of Law

The USC Gould School of Law, located in Los Angeles, California, is the law school of the University of Southern California. The oldest law school in the Southwestern United States, USC Law traces its beginnings to 1896 and became affiliated with USC in 1900. It was named in honor of Judge James Gould in the mid-1960s. History On March 12, 1890, the Los Angeles Times declared in an editorial: "It is time that a law school should be established in Los Angeles." During the 1890s, there were several false starts at founding the first law school in Southern California. At its founding in 1891, Throop University (better known today as the California Institute of Technology) announced its intent to include a college of law among its various planned components, but never actually started one. The Southern California College of Law was founded in 1892 and operated until 1894. In the absence of a formal law school, young men interested in careers in law (female lawyers were extremely rare at the time) formed several law student associations over the years which organized lectures by local attorneys as well as quiz sessions in which the students orally quizzed each other or were quizzed by an attorney. At the time, the term "law student" simply meant anyone who was actively studying law, either in an attorney's office, or by correspondence, or on their own. Law student associations were tiny, informal, fluid, and unstable, since individual students' level of interest in helping to run the associations tended to evaporate once they became members of the California bar and needed to focus on the actual practice of law. The common objective of students participating in such associations was to develop an understanding of California law strong enough to survive the bar examination of that era: oral cross-examination on various legal subjects by the members of the Supreme Court of California.