A new partnership between St. Mary’s University and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has secured a long-awaited Legal Education Hub in the Rio Grande Valley.
St. Mary’s President Winston Erevelles visited the Valley last week to sign a memorandum of understanding alongside UTRGV President Guy Bailey. The agreement secures at least five spots for students in the region in St. Mary’s School of Law’s Online Doctor of Jurisprudence and Master of Legal Studies programs.
The move answers a decades-long plea by state Rep. Armando “Mando” Martinez, D-Weslaco, who filed legislation for at least the last eight years asking for the creation of a public law school in the Rio Grande Valley, as reported by The Texas Tribune.
“So many kids from the Valley who go to law school, go to St. Mary’s,” Bailey said. “But this is going to really help ambitious kids who really can’t afford to leave home for a variety of reasons.”
As the only institution with a law school in South Texas, St. Mary’s serves a large number of Rio Grande Valley students, Erevelles said. Each year, about 5% of incoming law students are from the Valley, but many of them might not end up returning home to practice, creating a shortage of lawyers in the region.
“In the Rio Grande Valley, you’ve got roughly about one attorney for every 800 residents,” Erevelles said. “Now if you compare that to Bexar County or other Texas metropolitan areas, that number varies between one for every 100 residents or one for every 300 residents.”
The St. Mary’s online law program is highly competitive and selective, Erevelles said. It currently welcomes about 2% of all applicants for its available 25 seats. So setting aside a minimum of five spots for Valley residents means allocating 20% of the total space.
To qualify, students must be accepted and enrolled in the St. Mary’s online J.D. or M.L.S. program, provide proof of residency in the counties of Cameron, Hidalgo, Willacy or Starr and complete the UTRGV Hub student registration process.
UTRGV agreed to set aside classroom space in the Edinburg campus library for this cohort to have access to technology, study space and support when needed. This is the first step in a program that both presidents say could grow with demand.
St. Mary’s staff will help advise the UTRGV faculty on strengthening its pre-law program. They will also provide legal research resources for the students in the hub, as well as academic support and academic oversight that will mean having representatives from the college visiting the students at UTRGV periodically.
“It also means that the students have full access to the UTRGV library resources, study spaces, campus facilities and so there’s now a physical presence,” Erevelles said. “Learning happens not just from the faculty member, but from each other as well so they can ask questions, they can support each other in real time.”
Decades in the making
Conversations about the need for a law school in the Rio Grande Valley have persisted through the years. About 13 years ago when legislation called for the dissolution of UT-Pan American and UT-Brownsville to create UTRGV, many wondered if this opened the door for the creation of a law school.
But UTRGV’s promise at the time was to establish a medical school, the first in the region and grow access to the medical field and to health care in the region. The UTRGV School of Medicine welcomed its first class in 2016.
“We’ve added not only the medical school, but since [we’ve opened] the only school of pediatric medicine in Texas, we’ve added physical therapy, and optometry starts in fall of ‘27,” Bailey said. “And so based on all those things we just really didn’t have the resources to start a law school and this turned out to be a wonderful solution.”
Erevelles said conversations about expanding the St. Mary’s presence in the Valley started years ago, but they wondered if this was the right move for the private Catholic university.
“To me it always felt like if we’re going into the Valley, why not partner with the big university in town,” Erevelles said. “And there was a lot of conversation because you’re bringing together, first of all, two separate universities, but you’re bringing a private-public partnership to table.”
For St. Mary’s, this type of public-private partnership is not necessarily new, as the university has similar agreements with other higher education institutions. For UTRGV this is the first of this level and scope with a private higher education institution, Bailey said.
Both university presidents didn’t rule out the potential for growth of this partnership in the future based on demand. That’s why they agreed to start with a minimum of five seats and go from there. The two presidents talked about building an accelerated “3+3” program to one day allow students to earn the JD degree in six years instead of the traditional seven years.
Growth for UTRGV could also mean expanding the hub, as the UTRGV campuses in Edinburg, Brownsville and Harlingen sit between 30 to 60 miles apart. And for Erevelles this might also come with adding more seats to the program.
“We’ve got to see what the interest looks like and we got to see what the growth looks like,” Erevelles said. “And we’ve also got to see what can be supported. The thing that has to remain front and center is the quality of what we do.”
