About the Law School

Loyola Law School History

On Venice Boulevard, between Vermont and Normandie, sits the original site of Loyola Law School. Founded on September 8, 1920, the Law School was originally housed in a single room on the second floor of Loyola High School. Then known as St. Vincent’s School of Law and part of Loyola College, it had only a handful of students, most of whom pursued their undergraduate degree at the same time as their law degree. Tuition for the year was $90, and few students could afford even one year. Many students received tuition loans, and only later in life did they learn that their education was paid for by the Jesuits and professors. Credited for keeping Loyola going during its formative years, these men provided a legal education to those of all religious faiths who could not otherwise afford it.

Loyola’s first class graduated five years after the school’s founding, and seven of its eight members passed the California State Bar Examination. The school’s first class included one woman, Anne O’Keefe, who began her legal studies the same month and year American women won the right to vote. She graduated early, in advance of the men in her class, and she was sworn in as Los Angeles’s first woman commissioner. Today, there are 1,360 students at Loyola and 50 percent are women. The school ranks 12th among the nation’s law schools in minority enrollment. 

A mid-1920s admissions catalog describes the school: “In this, the St. Vincent’s School of Law, Loyola has a department of which she and all of us might well be proud, and judging from its phenomenal growth and unrivaled success in the past, we feel quite confident that, as the years glide by, it will flourish, expand and become a leading law school of the West.” Since 1920, the faculty, students and alumni built Loyola Law to be exactly this.