St. Mary's Law School ("StMLS") is a great law school with a proud history.
Most of the law school facilities were constructed in the late 1960s. The library has an impressive amount of titles, treatises, reporters, and legal periodicals. Some of these are quite old and the oldest books are probably a little musty. Of course, this is true in any library and perhaps your friend had just never spent much time in a library before. However, the library also has the most up to date publications and has modern internet connections. If you walk through it, and look at the carpet, the lighting, the glass doors and the furniture, it's an impressive facility and ranks as a quality legal research institution.
As far as the legal market in the area, San Antonio is the eighth largest city in the United States. The law firms in the San Antonio area have a preference for STMLS graduates. Large law firms recruit on the St. Mary's campus.
StMLS is an institution with a rich history. It is difficult to appraise the reputation of an institution when that reputation needs to be measured in terms of decades, rather than just glancing at the last year’s statistics. For decades, StMLS ranked in the top three or four of the Texas Law Schools in terms of bar passage rate. In the 1980s, the school was in the top three of Texas law schools five times out of ten July bar exam administrations. The school was entrenched as one of the best law schools in the state. It must be noted, however, that there was no U.S. News and World Reports “ranking system” for any law schools until after 1987. Prior to the USNWR publication, bar passage rate was seen as an indicator of the quality of a law school’s program. St. Mary’s was known as a “lawyer’s lawschool.” It was a place where individuals could go and learn from Texas lawyers. By all accounts, it was a rigorous program, disciplined, and firmly committed to the “nuts and bolts” of the practice of law. Many people who know something about the school are aware that StMLS had a dip in their bar passage rates in the 1990s; however, the school changed management and the bar passage rates have been on the rise again. There are more than 300 StMLS graduates that are elected officials in the United States. StMLS has a current U.S. Senator (John Cornyn--Tex.). It's a fine law school and you should go and visit the school.
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