Law school openings, closures, mergers, and name changes: a timeline

A current-year number is a snapshot, and snapshots hide direction. The most useful warning an applicant can study is a school's trajectory, and no trajectory is louder than a school that went from healthy to shuttered in under a decade. This is the chronological record of the U.S. law schools that opened, merged, were renamed, lost ABA accreditation, or closed.

Why this matters before you apply

Rankings describe prestige today. They say nothing about whether a school will still be granting degrees, or still be accredited, when you graduate into the job market three years from now. A school can report a respectable bar pass rate the same year its enrollment, faculty, and finances are quietly collapsing. By the time the closure announcement lands, the applicants who needed the warning have already enrolled.

That is why Exhibit 509 keeps the full history since 2011 of every school, including the ones that have since closed, with their records intact. As we argue in is law school worth it, a single year of data can fool you; the direction of travel cannot. The timeline below is the hub. Each entry names the year, the school, and what happened, and links to the school's profile where it still exists in our dataset so you can read the trend lines that preceded the headline.

The timeline

arrival or new accreditation closure, merger, or lost accreditation ongoing watch

• 2011
  • OpensUC Irvine School of Law wins ABA provisional accreditation two years after enrolling its inaugural class, the flagship new public law school of the post-recession era.
  • OpensBelmont University College of Law opens in Nashville, a new private J.D. program built as the market was about to contract.
• 2013
  • AcquiredTexas A&M University acquires the former Texas Wesleyan University School of Law and relaunches it as Texas A&M University School of Law, converting a standalone private school into a well-funded public one, the inverse of the closures that follow.
• 2014
  • OpensUniversity of North Texas at Dallas College of Law opens in downtown Dallas and enrolls its first ABA-provisional class, the rare new public law school of the decade.
• 2015
  • MergerHamline University School of Law and William Mitchell College of Law combine into Mitchell Hamline School of Law, the first merger of two ABA-accredited schools in the modern era.
• 2016
  • AccreditedUniversity of Massachusetts School of Law (Dartmouth) earns full ABA accreditation, becoming the state's first and only public law school.
  • AccreditedBelmont University College of Law earns full ABA accreditation, five years after opening.
• 2017
  • Lost accreditationCharlotte School of Law loses its ABA accreditation and federal student-aid eligibility, and shuts its doors within months.
  • ClosesConcordia University School of Law (Boise) winds down its J.D. program.
  • ClosesIndiana Tech Law School closes after only four years, never having graduated a class to a healthy bar-pass cohort.
  • Teach-outWhittier Law School announces it will stop enrolling new students and teach out its remaining class, the first ABA-accredited school to close in this wave.
• 2019
  • ClosesArizona Summit Law School closes after a sharp pre-closure collapse in faculty and outcomes.
  • Merger / renameThe John Marshall Law School (Chicago) merges into the University of Illinois Chicago to become UIC Law (now UIC School of Law), turning a standalone private school into a public university's law school.
  • AccreditedLincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law (Knoxville) wins full ABA accreditation a decade after opening, and after early accreditation setbacks, the rare comeback in a decade of contractions.
• 2020
  • ClosesValparaiso University Law School teaches out and closes after an attempted, then abandoned, transfer to another university.
• 2021
  • Lost accreditationFlorida Coastal School of Law loses access to federal student aid and its ABA standing, and closes while winding down.
• 2022
  • OpensJacksonville University College of Law enrolls its inaugural class, Florida's first new law school in more than two decades.
• 2024
  • Teach-outGolden Gate University School of Law announces it will wind down its ABA J.D. program, teaching out enrolled students through 2027.
  • AccreditedJacksonville University College of Law receives ABA provisional accreditation, less than two years after opening.
• 2025
  • ReunifiedPenn State Law (University Park) is reunified into Penn State Dickinson Law, reversing the 2014–15 split into two separately accredited schools.
  • OpensHigh Point University's Kenneth F. Kahn School of Law (North Carolina), which enrolled its inaugural class in fall 2024, receives ABA provisional accreditation, the newest arrival in our tracking.
• Ongoing
  • ProbationUniversity of La Verne College of Law continues under ABA scrutiny with a limited program, a trajectory worth watching closely.
  • Lost accreditationThomas Jefferson School of Law lost its ABA accreditation and now operates as a state-accredited (California) school outside the ABA system.

How to read this list

Not every event here is a death. Several are arrivals, UC Irvine, Belmont, Texas A&M, UMass Dartmouth, North Texas at Dallas, Lincoln Memorial, Jacksonville, and High Point are schools that opened or won accreditation, even as the market contracted around them; the Mitchell Hamline and UIC stories are consolidations that produced stronger institutions; and the Penn State reunification simply undoes an earlier split. The rest are warnings. Open any school above and you can watch the metrics that preceded the headline: the bar-pass slide, the faculty contraction, the enrollment drop. Run that same trajectory read on any school still operating, and you have the single best early-warning system the public data offers. Verify anything that drives a decision against the methodology and the original ABA disclosure.

This page is a hub. Per-school deep dives, tracing each institution's full arc since 2011 from its strongest year to its last disclosure, are coming, and will link back here as we publish them.