Los Angeles Premiere

Like many a younger child, the University of California at Los Angeles has long been jealous of its big sister at Berkeley, the University of California. Though U.C.L.A. has sprouted into something of an Amazon itself (present enrollment: 14,983), its graduates think it has sometimes been treated like a gangling adolescent. One graduate gripe: though Berkeley has had a law school for years, U.C.L.A. had none.

Last week U.C.L.A. was catching up. With little ceremony but with pronouncements befitting Southern California's civic confidence, the Los Angeles school threw open its doors to its first law students. Chosen from more than 400 applicants, the 54 pioneers will spend their first year in classrooms borrowed from U.C.L.A.'s liberal-arts school; next year, with an expected entering class of 200, they will have a $1,600,000 building of their own. Eventually, enrollment is expected to top 500.

As the new school opened, no one was more excited than handsome Dr. L. Dale Coffman, 44, its first dean. Said he: "[It is] the greatest founding since the University of Chicago Law School in this century." A onetime professor at the University of Nebraska, later a corporation lawyer with General Electric Co., and for the last three years dean of Vanderbilt University's law school, Coffman had good reason to be happy at his big premiere. As its chief academic attraction he had persuaded Roscoe Pound, retired dean of the Harvard Law School and revered in the field of jurisprudence, to serve as "visiting professor" at U.C.L.A. (Because he is 78 and far past U.C.L.A.'s retirement age, Pound signed up only on a year-to-year basis.) With Pound's assistance, U.C.L.A. expects to make its law library "one of the finest and most complete on the coast --if not the nation."

Though Coffman plans no radical departures from the tried & true methods of legal education, his five-man faculty will "update the students on the new kinds of law which have become important--administrative law, taxation and labor law." Says he: "We believe in the blocking and tackling school of education--good fundamental training . . . We want to turn out men who will become leaders of the bar."

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