Dear Colleagues:
 
As part of our larger effort to advance the school on all fronts, we undertook a positioning exercise with three interrelated objectives: to simplify use of our multiple names, to create a distinctive and coherent design for the school and its affiliates, and to orchestrate our communications activities to boost awareness and esteem among all audiences critical to our success.
 
We involved about 120 members of the school community in the project, including new and longtime faculty, students at every level, senior administrators, all five living former deans, and dozens of alumni in five cities across the country. In group sessions held over a period of months, we raised questions, elicited ideas, and vetted recommendations. Resolving our name issue was especially difficult because we have two primary names, both of which carry tremendous prestige. In partnership with representatives of all major constituencies, we arrived at the following conclusions.  
 
Our official name has been—and will continue to be—the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. We will use this name and especially its short form, Berkeley Law, in most communication with external audiences. The name Berkeley is known worldwide as the gold standard in higher education. And Berkeley Law mirrors the names of our peer schools, all of which exploit the equity in their university names: Harvard Law, Stanford Law, Michigan Law, etc.
 
We will continue to use the name Boalt Hall, primarily in communications with alumni and internally for the campus community. The Boalt name is enormously meaningful to countless people who’ve been associated with the school over the years, including newcomers like me. And we want to reinforce those sentiments of pride and connectedness across generations.    
 
To accommodate all of our major constituencies, we have developed a graphic identity system that consists of a family of logos representing the school and its affiliates, plus corresponding suites of materials for correspondence, presentation, and other purposes. Details on our naming decisions and a display of the new logo/letterhead system are posted on our Web site at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/identity. As you’ll see, we’ve swapped out the banner on the home page, initiating our migration to the new graphic identity. Later this year, we will launch a completely refreshed and redesigned Web site, not only to help support our capital campaign, but to improve functionality and make it more inviting to the public.
 
If you have questions about ordering stationery or receiving files, contact Bobbi Sloan at rsloan@law.berkeley.edu. For information about the overall program, contact Sybil Wyatt at swyatt@law.berkeley.edu. Or, of course, feel free to share your thoughts with me.
 
We look forward to hearing from you.

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Christopher Edley, Jr.
Dean & William H. Orrick, Jr. Professor of Law
Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley