Women are expected to be the majority of students entering law school this fall, a development that is already leading to changes in the way law is practiced.
And the trend is ultimately expected to help propel more women into leadership positions in politics and business.
Women, who made up about 10 percent of first-year law students in 1970, accounted for 49.4 percent of the 43,518 students who began law school last fall, according to data to be released soon by the American Bar Association, and that rate of growth is expected to continue.
As of March 9, more women than men had applied for admission to law schools this fall.
That trend will affect the way law schools operate — perhaps making classes less adversarial, for instance — and change somewhat the way law firms operate, lawyers and professors said.
But even more significant, as the number of women with law degrees continues to grow, they may be more likely to pursue careers in business and politics where legal training has often served as a springboard to positions of power.
While law schools at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University don't yet have a complete count of next fall's class, both schools have seen an increase in numbers of women students.
Of the students accepted so far at BYU's J. Reuben Clark Law School, 42 percent are female. That's up 8 percent over last year, according to the LDS Church-owned school.
At the U., the state's flagship public school, 43 percent of 386 students now in classes at the College of Law are women.
Several factors are driving the increase. While certainly seeking the security, income and prestige that have long drawn men to the law, women are also reacting to the decline of real and perceived barriers in the profession.
Some important obstacles still remain. Despite the increasing number of women graduating from law school and passing bar exams, the proportion of judges and partners at major law firms who are women has not kept pace.
There has been "a slow changing of assumptions about what women should consider doing," said Jean K. Webb, director of admissions at Yale Law School, where women accounted for a majority of the entering class for the first time last fall. Women were 46 percent of the entering class at Harvard Law School last fall, 44 percent at Stanford Law School, 51 percent at Columbia Law School and 50 percent at New York University School of Law.
The attraction of law school for many young women is not so much the law itself as the opportunities a law degree may enable. "It gives you so many options about different kinds of work you can do," said Mallory Ciar Curran, a second-year law student at NYU.
A law degree can make it easier to get a job as a government policy analyst, enter politics or move up in business, as well as represent individual clients, she said.
More women in law school classes may lead professors to re-evaluate how they teach. The adversarial environment fostered by some classes may not prepare students for the real-world practice of law, according to Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School, because today most lawyers do not go to court and do not practice alone.
Contributing: Deseret News staff writer Jeffrey P. Haney