Admissions Office, 701 South State Street, Suite 2200
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-3091
Phone: 734.764.0537
E-mail: law.jd.admissions@umich.edu; Website: www.law.umich.edu
The University of Michigan Law School, founded in 1859, is one of the nation's finest institutions of legal education. The school's distinguished and diverse faculty, many preeminent in their fields, have a history of devotion to both scholarship and teaching. Our students come from around the globe to contribute their remarkable talents and accomplishments and make the Law School a collegial community that exudes a sense of serious purpose, academic achievement, and social commitment. Never restricted to the privileged, in 1870, Michigan—then the largest law school in the country—became the second university to confer a law degree on an African American. That same year, Michigan became the first major law school to admit a woman, and in 1871, its graduate, Sarah Killgore, became the first woman with a law degree in the nation to be admitted to the bar.
Michigan has more than 80 full-time faculty members, with many distinguished visiting scholars further enhancing course offerings. While maintaining a long tradition of eminence in constitutional, criminal, international, and comparative law, the interdisciplinary breadth of the faculty is reflected in an extraordinary range of expertise, including classics, economics, feminist theory, history, life sciences, natural resources, philosophy, political theory, and public policy. We offer depth as well, whether measured by the number of professors who are also voting faculty members of a world-class department in another discipline, the number with PhDs in cognate disciplines, or the number who are Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The location of residential and academic buildings within the strikingly beautiful Gothic architecture of the William W. Cook Law Quadrangle fosters the integration of activities for both students and faculty. The new state-of-the-art South Hall academic building and a 16,000-square-foot, glass-roofed commons opened in 2011, providing additional dynamic, inspiring spaces for learning as well as social interactions.
With more than one million volumes, the Law Library's comprehensive collection covers Anglo-American, foreign, comparative, and international law, and includes legislation, court reports, and administrative material from all US jurisdictions, Great Britain, Europe, and most Asian and South American countries. In 1957, the library became the first depository of EU documents at an American university. It is also a selective depository for US government publications and extensively collects documents of international intergovernmental organizations. There is special depth in collections relating to indigenous peoples. Law students also have access to all other university libraries.
Recognized as preeminent in interdisciplinary legal studies, the insights and methods of many other fields are apparent throughout our broad curriculum. Formal dual-degree programs are available in 14 disciplines, while others are created ad hoc, sometimes with other institutions. Alternatively, students may count 12 credits of graduate-level work in other departments toward their JD. With the Law School located at the center of the university, it is easy for students to take advantage of these options, and about 15 percent of second- and third-year students do so.
A key component of the first year is our exceptional Legal Practice Program. This comprehensive class provides individualized instruction in legal writing, research, and oral advocacy by full-time faculty to first-year students.
Particularly renowned for international scholarship, Michigan's leadership is evident in its requirement that all students complete Transnational Law—the first top law school to so recognize the centrality of the field to modern lawyering. The Geneva Externship Program provides 20 students annually with a unique "in" to extremely competitive jobs in the public international field, while other programs, such as the South Africa Externship Program, the Program for Law and Development in Cambodia, and our AIRE Centre internships provide students with advanced training in international areas of interest.
As one of the leaders in American legal education, Michigan's curriculum is strong across the board. Students with interest in business, corporate, and securities; intellectual property; criminal; international; tax; constitutional; environmental; and public interest law should pay special attention to Michigan's extensive offerings.
Michigan is committed to the union of theory and practice, and our clinical practice program, with more than 30 years of experience, is unquestionably one of the nation's best. Michigan is one of only two states to allow students to appear in court as early as their second year, which means that our students have more opportunities to represent clients selected from a rich pool of cases—often in smaller jurisdictions, where a faster timetable allows students to handle many cases from beginning to end. Beyond the General Clinic, where students are involved in civil and criminal trial work, as well as immigration and refugee cases, our diverse offerings include litigation clinics in Child Advocacy Law, Juvenile Justice, Criminal Appellate Practice, and Human Trafficking, as well as our groundbreaking non-DNA Innocence Clinic; transactional clinics such as Community and Economic Development, Entrepreneurship, International Transactions, Federal Appellate Litigation Clinic, and Low Income Tax; the interdisciplinary medicolegal Pediatric Advocacy Clinic; an Environmental Law Clinic run in cooperation with the National Wildlife Federation; and a Mediation Clinic. Students can also participate in the Family Law Project, a student-run advocacy program for victims of domestic violence, as well as a variety of practicums—in fields ranging from copyright to bankruptcy—in which real cases are dissected in a classroom setting.
Please refer to Applicant Profile for more information.
Approximately 450 students participate in six journals: the Michigan Law Review, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review, and the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. Two new provisional journals in the fields of private equity and environmental law further expand options for writing and editing. Students interested in honing advocacy skills may choose to enter numerous moot court competitions. The Law School Student Senate funds more than 60 student organizations dedicated to affinity group membership and legal interests; students also participate in university groups. Our voluntary Pro Bono Pledge gives students yet one more outlet to serve the world outside the Law School with their developing legal skills; projects range from local to global in providing underrepresented individuals with valuable expertise.
Our financial aid resources are substantial, and we distribute more than $3.5 million in grants annually to each entering class. Grants range in size from $5,000 to as much as full tuition plus a stipend, and average about $15,000 annually. Our resources are divided between grants made with reference to financial need, and merit awards made to outstanding candidates who are remarkable for their anticipated contribution to the Law School and the profession.
Michigan's newly redesigned and generous income-based Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) provides graduates with the flexibility to choose jobs from an unlimited range of law-related opportunities, including lower-paying public interest positions, while still maintaining a reasonable lifestyle.
Michigan offers unsurpassed opportunities for career prospects. Our location in the center of the country means that employers from all major markets target our graduates, and our on-campus recruiting program is consistently one of the nation's largest, even in comparison to other top schools—both in absolute numbers of employers recruiting and in relative terms of interviews per student. While the majority of our graduates go to the best and largest private-sector firms across the nation, the range of work performed by our alumni is truly extraordinary. Michigan is, for example, among the leaders in training people for the state and federal bench, as well as academia. Each year our graduates earn prestigious post-graduate fellowships, including those offered by the Skadden Foundation and Equal Justice Works. And as one of only a handful of schools regularly sending its graduates to more than 30 states and abroad, our students have confidence that their degrees will be portable wherever they choose to live. The largest number of our graduates go to New York City and Chicago, followed closely by California and Washington, DC. Our reach extends well beyond these cities, though; the most recent class sent graduates to markets ranging from Seattle to Miami, London to Madrid, and to Hanoi, to name just a few.
Our seven full-time attorney-counselors and two part-time alumni counselors have broad legal experience and advise students about the full range of professional opportunities. Both when the market is flourishing and when it contracts, Michigan's robust recruiting program and the depth of its counselors' expertise serve students exceptionally well.
Ann Arbor combines ease of living with superb cultural, athletic, and entertainment offerings. The on-campus Lawyers Club, to be renovated during the 2012–2013 academic year, houses many first-year, upper-class, and LLM students, allowing easy access to academic buildings and camaraderie of life in the Law Quad. High-quality, off-campus housing is available in a wide variety of choices. Economical university family housing is also available a short (and free) bus ride away, in northeast Ann Arbor.
We choose not to provide an applicant profile because we do not believe a grid based on undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores can accurately reflect our comprehensive admission process, which focuses on many elements in an application in order to determine an applicant's particular intellectual strengths, nonacademic achievements, and unique personal circumstances. We view our student body as one of our greatest assets, and our goal is to admit a group of students who, individually and collectively, are among the best applying to US law schools in a given year. We seek a mix of students with varying backgrounds and experiences who will respect and learn from each other. Our most general measures are an applicant's LSAT score and undergraduate GPA. As measured by those statistics, Michigan is among a handful of the most selective law schools in the country. However, each of these measures is far from perfect. Even the highest possible scores will not guarantee admission, and low scores will likewise not automatically result in a denial, as both circumstances may have significant offsetting considerations.