The University of New Hampshire Law School’s new name will be familiar to Concord residents.

The school will be known as the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law, according to a Tuesday press release. The change is effective immediately.

The change comes just days after UNH Law graduated its 44th class of students. Dean Megan Carpenter said new diplomas with the name change will be made available to students who request it.

“Many alumni have asked for this over the years, and the decision to recognize the Franklin Pierce brand in the name of the school is something that will connect our current students to a worldwide network of attorneys,” Carpenter said via email.

The merger is meant to recognize the important place UNH Law’s Franklin Pierce Center has within the school, according to the press release. The center focuses on intellectual property, a discipline of law that covers copyrights, patents, privacy and similar topics.

The school’s focus on intellectual property is well-recognized: The school recently was named among the “Top 5” law schools with a focus on intellectual property in U.S. News & World Ranking’s 2020 list, putting it among the ranks of law schools at Stanford and UC Berkeley, according to the school’s website.

The Franklin Pierce Law Center was founded in 1973 and moved to its current location in 1976, according to Monitor archives. In 2010, the state approved a merger between UNH and the Law Center. The joiner was finalized a few years later.

The law school proposed the affiliation with UNH in an effort to break into the top 100 rankings for law schools in the U.S. by affiliating itself with a national research university, Monitor archives show.

Though they share a name, Carpenter said former president Franklin Pierce has no relation to the study of intellectual property. She wasn’t sure how the school’s original name came about, but said it may have something to do with the center needing to affiliate itself with an existing university when it was launched.

(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or@ActualCAndrews.)