University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law opened in 2014 and is in the midst of a grand experiment. As the 10th law school in the state of Texas, and the only public law school in the city of Dallas. UNT Dallas Law School is hoping to create practice-ready attorneys who will carry their skills into public service roles without a heavy debt load.
The school received provisional accreditation from the American Bar Association in 2017, and will be eligible for full ABA accreditation in 2020.
“Our goal has always been to equip graduates with practice-ready competencies and the practical knowledge to pass the Texas Bar Exam,” said Royal Furgeson, founding Dean of UNT Dallas College of Law.  “We now have a clear path to demonstrate that the innovative curriculum and the resources we’ve established will support exactly that kind of success.”
UNT Dallas Law School has a different vision for legal education, Furgeson said. The law school’s curriculum reflects three overall themes: ensuring that all students graduate with practice-ready competencies; providing students with the opportunity to explore a range of interest areas through electives and experiences; and providing students with the opportunity to develop deeper and specialized knowledge, skills and understandings in areas that interest them.
Rather than conducting one final exam at the end of each semester, students participate in regularly scheduled assessments to monitor student progress and ensure that no student falls behind. Many of UNT Dallas’ upper level courses include lab components in which legal theory is applied through activities simulating the practice of law. In addition, the school provides mentoring opportunities with practicing lawyers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
UNT Dallas also offers a part-time evening program for working students — the only one of its kind in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
In keeping with the law school’s goal of making legal education affordable, tuition at UNT Dallas offers the lowest tuition in the nation, at just $8,748 a year. The law school also evaluates students holistically, emphasizing life experience over LSAT scores and GPAs. As a consequence, UNT Dallas is one of the most diverse law schools in the country with a student mix of 22 percent Hispanic, 21 percent African American, 5 percent Asian and 47 percent white. It ranked No. 20 in the nation for Hispanics and No. 10 for African Americans.
The UNT Dallas College of Law campus is located in the heart of downtown Dallas — a city experiencing population growth of nearly 400 people per day.