Celebration on Saturday to honor 100th graduate of UH Law School's Evening Part Time Program

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Beverly Creamer, (808) 389-5736
Media Consultant, William S. Richardson School of Law
Posted: Aug 25, 2016

Evening Part Time Program Entering Class of 2015
Evening Part Time Program Entering Class of 2015

The Evening Part Time Program at the UH Law School will celebrate its 100th graduate at a special public fund-raising event from 5:30-8:30 p.m. on Saturday evening, August 27, 2016, at the Oahu Country Club. Tickets are $20 for Law School students and $46 for others.

Proceeds will go to the Hazel Beh Scholarship Fund, administered by UH Foundation, that was founded to increase access and affordability for evening students to attend the William S. Richardson School of Law. It was Professor Beh who designed the Evening Part Time Program and helped put it in place in 2008.

Tickets are available through Michele Nakata at (808) 349-2335 or mnakata@hawaii.edu

The Evening Part Time Program is ranked 28th in the nation among part-time law programs. Now eight years old, the program was launched to meet the needs of students with professional, financial and family obligations during the day. It has attracted a diverse range of students from a wide variety of professional and educational backgrounds.

Said Liam Skilling, Director of the Evening Part Time Program, “The students make the Evening Part Time Program extraordinary. They are teachers and nurses, paralegals and engineers, members of the military and entrepreneurs fulfilling what for many is a lifelong dream of legal education. They juggle the demands of full-time work and family obligations while undertaking the rigors of legal education when many of us are getting ready for bed.”

In addition to Skilling, the evening will feature several speakers, including:

  • The Honorable Sabrina McKenna, Associate Justice of the Hawai‘i Supreme Court.
  • Attorney Gerald Sumida of Carlsmith Ball LLP.
  • Erin Chisholm Matsunaga of the Evening Part Time Program Inaugural Class.
  • Diana Kim of the 2016 Evening Part Time Program Class that includes the 100th graduate.

Dean Avi Soifer said that, right from the start, the new program “exceeded our hopes, as did the extraordinary breadth and diversity of the students enrolled in it."

Continued Soifer, “Given the range of different backgrounds that evening students bring to the classroom, their mutual support and cohesion truly has been remarkable.  And from the perspective of their professors, the evening classes are a delight to teach for many reasons, not least because of the wealth of different experiences the students bring to class and their confidence in expressing themselves, often based on their direct knowledge of many different worlds.”

Required classes for the Evening Part Time Program begin around 5:30 p.m. from Mondays through Thursdays; however, students can take their elective courses during the day, on Saturdays, or through the Summer Law program, as their schedules allow. Evening Part Time Program students have considerable flexibility over their progress through the program, although the majority graduate within four years.

Donations to the Beh Scholarship Fund, housed at the UH Foundation, may be made online at https://giving.uhfoundation.org/funds/12567404.

For more information, visit: https://www.law.hawaii.edu/