Saint Louis University School of Law: A St. Louis Institution with Deep Roots

Saint Louis University School of Law is a long-standing St. Louis institution connected to Saint Louis University, a private Jesuit research university. The law school’s history reaches back to 1843, when it opened under the leadership of Richard Aylett Buckner, a Kentucky district judge. Its founding made it the first law school established west of the Mississippi River.

That first version of the school did not continue indefinitely. It closed sometime after Buckner’s death in 1847. The law school was later re-established in 1908, creating the foundation for the institution known today as SLU Law. The revived school was located in St. Louis’s Midtown neighborhood, at the intersection of Leffingwell Avenue and Locust Street.

The 1908 re-establishment also marked an important change in access to the school’s legal education: female law students were admitted for the first time. The supplied historical record does not provide further detail about those students or the policies surrounding their admission, but it identifies the decision as part of the school’s return to operation.

In August 2013, the law school moved from its Midtown location to Scott Hall at 100 North Tucker Boulevard in downtown St. Louis. The 12-story facility is the school’s current home. Its spaces include classrooms and the Vincent C. Immel Law Library, named for a former law professor who taught at the school beginning in 1958.

SLU Law’s institutional credentials include American Bar Association approval dating to 1924. The school is also a member of the Association of American Law Schools. Those affiliations place the St. Louis law school within established national legal-education networks, while its campus and history remain closely tied to the city.

For readers interested in St. Louis institutions, SLU Law offers a compact example of how the city’s educational landscape has changed over time. Its story includes an early nineteenth-century founding, a period of closure, a twentieth-century revival, the admission of its first female students, and a later move into a downtown facility. The result is a law school whose history spans more than a century and whose present-day setting is part of the city’s central urban landscape.

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Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://web.archive.org/web/20150602193807/http://law.slu.edu/content/j-reuben-clark-law-society - https://web.archive.org/web/20060930132713/http://www.courts.mo.gov/page.asp?id=153 - https://www.slu.edu/about/key-facts/index.php - https://www.slu.edu/law/about/profile.php - https://viaf.org/viaf/130156222 - https://isni.org/isni/0000000110886851 Image rights Photograph description: Eça de Queirós Sculpture - Portuguese Writer "SOBRE A NUDEZ FORTE DA VERDADE O MANTO DIÁFANO DA FANTASIA" Name : José Maria de Eça de Queirós Date of birth: 25 de novembro de 1845, Praça do Almada Date of death: 16 de agosto de 1900, Paris, França Nationality : Portuguese Education : Coimbra University Eça de Queiroz was one of the most, if not the most, important Portuguese realism writers. Os Ma Creator: Pedro Ribeiro Simões from Lisboa, Portugal. License: CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AThe_Truth_(unveiled_1903)_-_Teixeira_Lopes_(1866_-_1942)_(15430568832).jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.