Reflecting on her own law school days, Gov. Janet Mills on Thursday helped inaugurate the new home of the University of Maine School of Law in Portland.
“I learned to think on my feet and perfect my research skills,” Mills said of her time on the school’s law review in her last year, during which she recalls eating a lot of chocolate and drinking a lot of coffee.
Forty seven years after Mills graduated in 1976, Maine’s first female attorney general and first female governor cut the ribbon on Maine’s new home at 300 Fore St. at a Thursday ceremony and open house attended by hundreds.
The leased building formerly housed the Council on International Education Exchange, which eliminated 248 jobs at the start of the pandemic. The nonprofit has since moved to South Portland.
Maine Law moved in after renovating a 64,000-square-foot building that brings students to the heart of the city’s Old Port, close to state and federal courts and the offices of several law firms.
The building also puts Maine Law under the same roof as the University of Maine Graduate and Professional Center, the University of Maine Graduate School of Business and the University of Maine Portland Gateway, along with offices of the University of Maine Foundation and the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service.
Maine Law Dean Leigh Saufley, a Maine Law alumna and former chief justice of Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court, remarked Thursday on how the building renovation had been completed in “20 short months.”
“If people tell you that the University of Maine System doesn’t know how to be nimble. they’re wrong,” Saufley told Thursday’s gathering.
In a shoutout to Consigli Construction, she said: “They still kept us on budget at a time when everything was challenging in the construction world … and managed a very challenging timeframe.”
Saufley emphasized that the most important reason for the move is the students, a theme that University of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy also touched on in his remarks.
“Law schools,” he said, “are nothing less than citadels of freedom.”
Speaking about education more generally, University of Maine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy commented that “being in education is being about the future.”
Before classes at 300 Fore St. begin Tuesday, visitors on Thursday toured the fifth-story building. It includes nine classrooms with state-of-the-art technology, customizable furnishings and natural light; bike storage and a library on the lower level; and a fourth-floor Innovation Space with Lego bricks and small tables for impromptu collaborations.
Dhivya Singaram, a second-year law student and UMaine System trustee, also spoke at Thursday’s event. She paid homage to both Mills and Saufley as trailblazers who “used the law to shape our state.”
She also noted that while the history and future of Maine Law are not bound by place, she and her fellow classmates “have the opportunity to shape Maine Law’s next chapter.”
Closing out the ceremony before the ribbon-cutting part of the evening on a rainy night, Saufley made a quick sales pitch for anyone interested in purchasing naming rights for parts of the building.
“That moot court classroom could have your name on the wall,” she said. “There are lots of naming opportunities … coming soon to a theater near you!”
