Our History

In 1908, two Boston women decided to sit for the Massachusetts bar examination. A lawyer named Arthur Winfield MacLean agreed to tutor them, and other students followed over the next few years. From that beginning, a school was established; MacLean's wife dubbed it Portia Law School, after the heroine of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." Arthur MacLean became the school's first dean.

Enrollment grew, and the first commencement was held in 1911. Beginning in 1920, Portia graduates received the LL.B. degree. During the school's early years, most women who passed the Massachusetts bar examination were Portia alumnae. In 1922, when the school moved into its first permanent building in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, enrollment had reached 228, and the results from the December 1921 bar exam showed that all the women who had passed were graduates of the school.

The only law school in the nation founded exclusively for the education of women, Portia Law School became coeducational in 1938. In 1969, the school's name was changed to New England School of Law, and accreditation was granted by the American Bar Association. The 1980s began with the school's move to its current location in Boston's Park Square area. In January 1998, the law school was elected to membership in the Association of American Law Schools.

The school's philosophical roots are evident today as it continues to offer a high-quality legal education to qualified students from a broad range of backgrounds.

Our early alumni included these groundbreakers:

• 1923 - Ellen L. Buckley became the only woman assistant United States attorney in New England and the third woman nationwide to receive such an appointment.
• 1923 - Blanche Braxton became the first African-American woman lawyer in Massachusetts and in 1933 became the first African-American woman to practice in the United States District Court in Massachusetts.
• 1926 - Margaret M. McChesney became the first woman lawyer to appear before the full bench of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
• 1931 - Dorothy R. Crockett of Providence, RI, received an LL.B. degree from Portia, becoming the first African-American woman from Rhode Island to earn a law degree and the second African-American woman to pass any bar examination in New England.
• 1934 - Hilda Hedstrom Quirk was appointed registrar of births, deaths, and marriages for Boston, the first woman to head a city department in Boston.
• 1934 - Ethel E. Mackiernan was appointed to the Nantucket District Court and became the first woman to serve as presiding justice of any court in Massachusetts.
• Late 1940s - Major Catherine E. Falvey was the only woman to head a department of the American legal staff at the Nuremberg war trials.