South Texas College of Law Houston

South Texas College of Law Houston began in 1923 as a project of the Houston YMCA, which launched the South Texas School of Law and Commerce to offer evening classes so working adults could study law. Classes met for roughly forty years inside the downtown YMCA, a building the school split with South Texas Junior College, until it opened its own campus in the J. Robert Neal Building on Polk Street in 1964. Entrance standards climbed over the same period, from a high school diploma in 1932 to a required bachelor's degree by 1965, the year the school switched from the LL.B. to the Juris Doctor. In 1984 the downtown campus was named the Jesse H. Jones Legal Center, and it was expanded in the late 1990s with a five-story library addition. It is accredited by the American Bar Association, joined the Association of American Law Schools in 1998, and that same year signed a short-lived affiliation agreement with Texas A&M University. In 2016 the school rebranded as Houston College of Law, but a trademark suit from the University of Houston System led it to adopt the name South Texas College of Law Houston within months, and the dispute was settled in 2017. Today the independent school, the oldest law school in Houston, is best known for trial advocacy and moot court teams that have collected well over a hundred national titles, and it celebrated its centennial in 2023.

Sources: en.wikipedia.orgtshaonline.orguh.edu