Yale Law School

Yale Law School, in New Haven, Connecticut, is a division of Yale University. It is regarded as one of the most prestigious law schools in the United States.

Famous alumni include Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Clarence Thomas, Byron White, Duncan Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Ben Stein, Reva Siegel, Pat Robertson, and Steven Brill.

It offers the J.D., LL.M., M.S.L., and J.S.D. degrees in law. In addition to its teaching activities, the school also has an active visiting scholars program and is home to a number of legal research centers.

Yale Law School's class, at about 200, is relatively small, and its student to faculty ratio, at 7.5, is the lowest of any law school in the U.S. Its small class size and high prestige combine to make its admissions process highly selective, with high GPA, high LSAT score, and very strong nonnumerical credentials being near-prerequisites to admission. Half of the class that entered in 2005 had GPA's at or above 3.88 and had LSAT's at or above 172 (99th percentile), out of 180 possible points.[1]

The school is known for its especially scholarly orientation and a disproportionately large number of its graduates (4%) choose careers in academia. Yale's curriculum is generally less geared toward corporate and commercial law than that of other leading schools, such as Columbia, Harvard and Stanford. More of its graduates take judicial clerkships than at any other school (38%).

Yale does not have a traditional grading system, a consequence of student unrest in the late 1960s. Instead, it grades first-semester first-year students on a simple Credit/No Credit system. For their remaining two and a half years, students are graded on an Honors/Pass/Low Pass/Failure system. Similarly, the school does not rank its students. It is also notable for having only a single semester of required classes, instead of the full year ordinarily required at American law schools.

YLS students publish 9 law journals which, unlike those at most other schools, accept student editors without a competition. The only exception to this policy is YLS's flagship journal, The Yale Law Journal, which holds an admissions competition each Spring.

Its law library is Lillian Goldman Law Library, and contains around 800,000 volumes. YLS's classrooms were redesigned in 1998 as part of a larger renovation begun in 1995.

Prominent Faculty

External links