Admissions Office, 1111 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: 773.702.9494; Fax: 773.834.0942
E-mail: admissions@law.uchicago.edu; Website: www.law.uchicago.edu
Chicago graduates lead and innovate in government, public interest, academia, and business, as well as in law. For this reason, Chicago aims not to certify lawyers, but to train well-rounded, critical, and socially conscious thinkers and doers. Three cornerstones provide the foundation for Chicago's educational mission: the marketplace of ideas, participatory learning, and interdisciplinary inquiry.
Our students' chief passions are ideas. They have shown this passion through their academic success, and they exhibit signs of great professional promise. Typically, 5,000 applicants seek approximately 190 seats in each incoming class. Chicago students come from more than 100 undergraduate institutions with degrees in nearly every discipline, and one in ten have graduate degrees. Many of our students have also had interesting and successful careers before law school.
What distinguishes Chicago faculty is their devotion to both teaching and scholarship. This might seem a contradiction at first, but at Chicago, teaching and scholarship complement each other. Chicago professors blaze trails in legal thought, and their revolutionary ideas infuse classroom discussion with immediacy and excitement. Our professors write the books, draft the statutes, and decide the cases that students read at law schools across America. During the 2011–2012 academic year, our faculty will teach more than 170 courses and seminars at the Law School.
As a first-year student, you will take a core sequence covering five principal areas of the law: contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and civil procedure; a required interdisciplinary course called Elements of the Law; an elective; and a yearlong course on research and writing. This curriculum familiarizes you with the basic principles of Anglo-American law, cultivates legal reasoning, develops writing ability, and introduces students to interdisciplinary approaches to the law.
In the second and third years, you can choose courses from the full range of Chicago's more than 170 classes. Generally, classes are small; more than 60 percent have fewer than 25 students in them. Additionally, in an average year, about one-third of the second- and third-year students take classes in other divisions of the university. We do not ask our students to choose a concentration, but rather let them put together a personalized education based on their individual interests.
The Law School encourages interdisciplinary work. All students may take 12 hours of coursework anywhere in the university. Students may also apply for four formal joint-degree programs either at the same time they apply to the Law School or in their first year. They may also work with Law School and university staff to arrange concurrent degrees. Formal joint-degree programs are with the Booth School of Business (MBA, PhD), the Economics Department (PhD), the Harris School of Public Policy (MPP), and the Committee on International Relations (MA).
The Law School is home to a wide variety of research programs. These programs provide excellent outlets for both the theoretical and empirical work of both faculty and students. In addition, these programs host conferences, publish working papers, and support journals. Centers currently at the Law School include the Center for Civil Justice, the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism, the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice, the Institute for Law and Economics, and the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values.
Housed in the Arthur Kane Center, our clinics involve more than 120 students each year in representing clients with real-world problems. The Mandel Legal Aid Clinic handles matters involving appellate advocacy, criminal and juvenile justice, employment discrimination, environmental law, civil rights, housing, immigration, mental health, and federal criminal law. The Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship assists aspiring entry-level entrepreneurs from low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. We also have the Immigrant Children's Advocacy Project, which provides a unique opportunity for our students to draw on immigration law, international law, family, and children's rights law. Recently added are the Exoneration Project, which provides representation to clients who are asserting their actual innocence in state and federal court, the Prosecution and Defense Clinic, where students combine in-class intensive criminal law study with a clinical placement in a prosecutor's or public defender's office, and the Gendered Violence and the Law Clinic, where students assist with representation of domestic and sexual violence survivors. The Law School also partners with outside agencies to provide additional clinical opportunities to our students.
About 40 percent of upper-class students serve on one of the three student-edited journals, which include the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Chicago Legal Forum, and the Chicago Journal of International Law. The Hinton Moot Court Board conducts a program in appellate advocacy for upper-class students, and first-year students participate in a moot court as part of the Bigelow Legal Research and Writing Program. More than 60 student organizations provide opportunities for the exploration of legal specialties, affiliation with like-minded students, or networking within identity groups.
Our career services office assists students with permanent and summer employment. Seven professional career advisors counsel students in one-on-one planning sessions. Programs on types of practices and nontraditional careers are organized throughout the year for students. The office focuses on individualized counseling and coaching based on each student's career and life goals. The top five destinations our graduates choose for employment are Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.
Hyde Park provides Chicago students with the best of all possible worlds—a campus with a college-town atmosphere just a few miles from the downtown area of a vibrant city. Hyde Park is a dynamic community with parks, museums, and multiple bookstores. The Law School is located at the southern end of campus, facing an expansive "front lawn" known as the Midway Plaisance. Surrounding the Law School is a tree-lined, diverse residential neighborhood, a sandy Lake Michigan beach, and two sprawling parks. The campus itself is a Gothic masterpiece where limestone buildings built around tree-shaded quadrangles sport gargoyles, ivy, and turrets. The Law School's modern building promotes interaction among faculty and students, while the recently remodeled library and classroom wing enhance the learning experience.
A graduate residence hall, located two blocks from the Law School, is available to law students. Most rooms are singles with private baths. In addition, the university has plenty of single- and married-student neighborhood housing available. Many students choose to rent housing from private landlords. Housing in Chicago is very affordable compared to most major cities. Buses run frequently throughout the surrounding neighborhood, providing transportation to and from residences and the Law School. Public transportation is easily accessible to other neighborhoods in Chicago.
Each year we seek to create a community from among the best and brightest law school applicants. We want students who are intellectually curious, lively, and collegial in their academic approach. We want students who will take their legal education seriously, but not take themselves too seriously. And because we are preparing students to enter a multifaceted profession, we want multidimensional students with a wide range of talents, backgrounds, experiences, and accomplishments. We do not use indices, formulas, or cutoffs.
Your Chicago legal education is an investment in your future. Because many students will not have sufficient personal resources to make this investment, Chicago provides generous financial aid. Twenty students in the class of 2015 will receive Rubenstein Scholarships, covering full tuition for all three years. Approximately 50 percent of Chicago Law students receive scholarships. The Law School also provides funding for students who work in public interest positions during their summers. After graduation, the Law School provides financial assistance to graduates who enter careers in public interest legal work through our generous Loan Repayment Assistance Program. Graduates earning $80,000 or less in a government, nonprofit, or public interest job can receive benefits.
We seek to create a community from among the best, the brightest, and the most interesting law school applicants. We do not believe that the LSAT and GPA alone provide us with sufficient information to evaluate an applicant's likely contributions to our community; therefore, we do not use any formulas, indices, or numerical cutoffs. We do not provide an applicant profile here because it would be based solely on the LSAT and GPA.