The John Marshall Law School recently received a $1.5 million grant to help cover a portion of the purchase price for the three-story 19 W. Jackson building. The more than 100-year-old building is being renovated for the law school’s Veteran’s Legal Support Center & Clinic (VLSC), which will occupy the building’s first floor.
The VLSC works on all aspects of Veteran Benefits Administration claims, from the initial, factual intake to the technical representation of claims at the appellate level. Students currently working at VLSC are in cramped quarters in the 315 S. Plymouth Ct. building, and the new space will be nearly 5,000-square-feet with first-floor access. It is being specially designed to meet the needs of veterans by reducing small spaces, designing with soft colors and making spaces accessible to persons with disabilities.
Expansion work at John Marshall has been ongoing since summer 2010 within the law school’s four contiguous buildings that make up the downtown Chicago campus.
The law school doubled its student lounge space; gave itself a State Street entrance and a place of prominence on Chicago’s major thoroughfare in the city’s “education corridor;” converted space for a third courtroom; reconfigured spaces for new faculty offices and now is in the midst of renovating space to meet the needs of its Veterans Legal Support Center & Clinic (VLSC).
Students will be returning for the fall semester to a new Student Commons space with a café, and a reworking of the second-floor Sargis-Miner Student Lounge, the original student area. The addition of the Student Commons, in a first-floor space once occupied by a Walgreen’s pharmacy, has doubled the student area for recreation, rest and study. And, the reconfigured second-floor lounge space provides student organizations new meeting and office space.
Beck’s Book Store, which serves the law school’s needs, has moved from the second floor to a new space off the State Street entrance.
The law school has owned the 315 S. Plymouth Ct. address since 1934. It expanded to a 12-story building on State Street in 1979, but had Walgreen’s as a tenant on the first floor. In 1996, the law school agreed to a condominium arrangement with the Chicago Bar Association, its neighbor at 321 S. Plymouth Ct. In 2010, the law school purchased the 19 W. Jackson St. building. John Marshall now has ownership of nearly all the property on one city block, and its expansion has given it a first-floor presence in Chicago’s South Loop.