Erwin Chemerinsky (UC-Irvine), Creating a Law School That Emphasizes Public Interest Law, 7 DePaul J. for Soc. Just. 1 (2013) talks about his deanship in the project of founding the law school in Irvine.
It really is a shame Irvine, with all that money, just aimed to be a generic top 20 law school instead of experimenting. And more important than money: it began with no vested interests in the form of stodgy and divided faculty to overcome. It's only chance to truly make top 20, as opposed to a safe number 50 or whatever it is, was to take a risk by doing something new that might turn out to be a total fiasco. But the risk, and lack of imagination, was probably why it didn't try. It could have been a banking-and-real-estate law school, or pure tax (including public-interest tax stuff), or even a pure criminal-law school, offering other stuff only as necessary to get accreditation, or even going unaccredited since in California that's not such a problem.
(hat tip: TaxProf)