Berkeley Law dean wants to drop name of Boalt Hall because of its racist taint

For more than 100 years the University of California, Berkeley School of Law has been known colloquially as Boalt Hall, but its dean wants the name dropped because it honors a man now known to have been an anti-Chinese racist.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky announced his decision on Tuesday in a written statement after considering a law school committee's recommendation to drop the Boalt name, and evaluating more than 600 messages about it, with 60 percent for removing the name and 40 percent against.

John Henry Boalt was a 19th-century San Francisco attorney and never a student at the school. He described Chinese laborers coming into California as unassimilable murderers and thieves and successfully pressed for an 1882 federal ban on Chinese immigration, which became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Boalt also spoke derisively about Native Americans and people of African descent.

Boalt's past became widely known last year after Charles Reichmann, a Berkeley law lecturer, published an op-ed article and then a law review article.

In 1906, Boalt's widow, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt, paid for a granite building in the center of campus that was once the law school, and then she donated $200,000 for a law school endowment. A wing of the new law school built in 1951 became Boalt Hall.

The campus building committee will launch its own review, which will include a public hearing, with a decision by UC Chancellor Carol Christ expected next spring. UC President Janet Napolitano then would have the final say.