At 8 a.m. every Monday, Jessica Manos ’27 drops her 5-year-old off at school in Phoenix. Then she drives about 350 miles to LMU Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles for her classes in its Hybrid JD Evening program.
“I get to Los Angeles at about 2 o’clock, and then I have class from 6-10,” Manos said. “Then I drive home the next morning, and I’m back in Phoenix in time to pick up my kids from school at three.”
She can live in Phoenix and go to law school in Los Angeles because “Loyola has this amazing program that only requires you to be on campus for one day a week,” she said. The regular one-night-a-week commitment is augmented by virtual coursework.
“It’s really doable for me and my family,” Manos said. “I love the program, and I feel like I’m getting a really good education.”
Loyola’s Hybrid JD Evening Program has consistently been ranked the top part-time program in the West by U.S. News & World Report.
Manos was drawn to a career in law by an important issue. A native of Chicago, she went to college in Boston and then founded a real estate development company in Connecticut. She was living in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012 when a young gunman murdered 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School there.
When she and her husband later sold their businesses and moved to Phoenix, she helped start a chapter of the national gun violence-prevention organization Moms Demand Action. By 2017, she was leading the Arizona state chapter.
In that role, she led the chapter in advocating for legislation to remove guns from people convicted of felony domestic abuse. “It was a really narrow law,” Manos said, because existing law already prevented those abusers from buying new guns.
The chapter worked hard to pass the bill, which had bipartisan sponsors and bipartisan support. But one legislator killed the bill in committee. “That really upset me,” she said. “I thought maybe instead of begging people to pass good laws, I’ll write them myself. And so I decided to go to law school.”
Actually, Manos had been thinking about law school since she was 8 years old. But with four children born within six years of each other, it wouldn’t have been easy to make the time. It finally became possible once her youngest started school.
Now, after one year of Loyola Law School classes, she is very impressed by the school, her colleagues, and the professors. “I’m enjoying the classes very much,” she said. “I think our professors are very talented. They have been able to take subjects that I thought would not be very interesting and make them engaging and relevant.”
She added that she is impressed by her classmates as well. “I love the kind of people this program is attracting. Everyone is talented and is doing really interesting things. It’s a privilege to learn with this group.”
Although she was drawn to law school by social issues, Manos is not sure what she’ll do after she graduates in 2027. “I came into it thinking public policy, but I’ve gotten great feedback on oral arguments that we’ve done. So now I’m thinking about potentially doing litigation.”
Might she run for office in Arizona? “I worked on a congressional campaign last year and I loved it, so, yeah, that might be a possibility,” she said.