Award Date

5-15-2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Committee Member

David Tanenhaus

Second Committee Member

Michael Green

Third Committee Member

Michelle Tusan

Fourth Committee Member

Todd Robinson

Fifth Committee Member

Addie Rolnick

Number of Pages

258

Abstract

This dissertation is a legal history of the William S. Boyd School of Law, Nevada’s only law school. Beginning with the twenty-five-year political effort to create the institution starting in the early 1970s through the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic the study argues that the law school, dedicated to institutional excellence and serving all of Nevada, symbolized both the rapid growth of the state’s population and the state’s pragmatic efforts to meet that population’s needs during a time of dramatic economic and political change even when it required compromise with the state’s tradition of low taxes and geographic factionalism between northern and southern Nevada. Much like historians of the Supreme Court use chief justiceships to break the past into distinct periods, this dissertation uses deanships in a similar organization fashion. After analyzing the long struggle to establish a law school in Nevada, the dissertation analyzes how deans, faculty, and students created a distinctive “Boyd” culture as part of the larger national efforts to rethink and restructure legal education, and how the law school then helped the state to navigate the challenges of the culture wars that erupted after the end of Cold War, the impact of the Great Recession on the state, and the rise of rightwing populism. The dissertation demonstrates how the Boyd School of Law was a product of its times, but then quickly helped to shape the history of the Silver State in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Keywords

Boyd; Las Vegas; law school; legal history; Nevada; Paradise

Disciplines

Education | Law | Other History | United States History

File Format

PDF

File Size

2100 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Available for download on Sunday, May 15, 2033


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