250 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201-9846
Phone: 718.780.7906; Fax: 718.780.0395
E-mail: admitq@brooklaw.edu; Website: www.brooklaw.edu
Situated at the junction of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, the Brooklyn Civic Center, and downtown Brooklyn, our school boasts a location unrivaled for its legal, cultural, and historical character. Students share their environs with federal and state judges, government officials, and lawyers in private practice, many of them alumni. Within a few-block radius are the US District Court; US Bankruptcy Court; US Attorney's Office; the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division; Family Court; the Brooklyn District Attorney; the Kings County Surrogate's Court; the New York City Civil and Criminal Courts; the Legal Aid Society; and numerous law firms. These are our laboratories, a backdrop for learning few schools can replicate.
Overlooking New York Harbor and lower Manhattan lies Brooklyn's most charming neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, the first New York City neighborhood to be designated as a historic district and where you will find much of our campus. Many of our students and faculty live here in residence halls or in private apartments and homes located on graceful, tree-lined streets, where many original townhouses, brownstone mansions, carriage houses, churches, and public buildings recall old-world urban elegance.
Multibillion-dollar construction projects continue to recast Brooklyn as the new center of New York City's energy. Nearby neighborhoods—Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, Williamsburg, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass)—offer trendy, affordable housing and a profusion of bistros, boutiques, galleries, and clubs, all contributing to GQ magazine citing Brooklyn as the "Coolest City on the Planet." Clearly, Brooklyn possesses the attributes to support its growing reputation as the hippest part of New York City.
Minutes away is the financial, legal, business, and cultural crossroads of the world: Manhattan. Proximity to Wall Street gives students easy access to school-year externships and summer jobs with major law firms and financial institutions. Students enjoy a great campus in a dynamic urban environment, softened by a small-neighborhood feel. This is New York City on a human scale—Manhattan without the hassle.
In recent years, BLS has made significant investments in capital improvements to serve its needs well into the twenty-first century. Nine residences—including our largest, the 21-story high-rise, Feil Hall—allow us to guarantee housing to all first-year students, engendering a strong sense of campus community. The library offers more than 589,000 multiformat volumes, numerous periodicals, and close to 300 databases accessible on and off campus. As one of the largest and most modern in the city, the 78,000-square-foot facility boasts 27 group-study rooms, seating for nearly 700, and 5 PC/Mac labs hosting nearly 100 workstations. We offer 2,400 other student-accessible wired network connections, and wireless network connections throughout our academic and residential buildings.
Our 73 full-time faculty members, joined by over 130 adjuncts (including many distinguished judges, practitioners, and corporate counsel), comprise one of the largest faculties in New York. They are extraordinarily talented and, above all, superb teachers. Shaping public policy and making law in the community at large, they are also prolific authors. They are recognized nationally and globally for their scholarship in such areas as Capital Defender and Criminal Law, Commercial and Bankruptcy Law, Corporate and Securities Law, Evidence, Family Law, Gender Discrimination, Human Rights, Information Privacy and Internet Law, Intellectual Property, International Business Law, Tax, and Torts. BLS offers a congenial community. Its learning environment, while rigorous and challenging, remains supportive and nurturing. Faculty members are accessible to students in a way that few faculties are. There is a strong correlation between the priority we assign to teaching and mentoring and student success on the bar examination. Our 2011 graduates who took the New York State Bar Examination for the first time had an 89.1 percent passing rate, well ahead of the 78.5 percent statewide rate for first-time takers.
One of our great strengths is the size, stature, and loyalty of our approximately 19,300 graduates in 49 states and Washington, DC; 3 US territories; and 35 foreign countries—among the largest alumni families of any law school.
The 2011 entering class included students from 27 states, plus Washington, DC; Puerto Rico; and 5 foreign countries. More than half of the class are graduates of many of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities. Seventy-two percent of them completed undergraduate work at least one year before enrolling here. More than half achieved LSAT scores of 163 or higher. Minorities represented approximately 28 percent of the class, while some 41 percent of the students were women.
Our Career Center team consists of experienced attorneys, including a director who brings over 20 years of multifaceted experience to the position, seven counselors, two employer relations specialists, and four dedicated career assistants. Through early outreach, an individualized approach to counseling, and comprehensive career development programs, the Center is committed to providing candidates with the building blocks necessary for a rewarding legal career. Students are helped to discover the practice of law and to determine individual interests, and are guided towards their careers from the first semester, through graduation and beyond. Through this rigorous approach to career development, graduates continue to find employment with a wide range of employers in the public and private sector. For our current employment statistics, please visit the school's website at www.brooklaw.edu/careers/employmentstatistics/bypractice.aspx.
Day students take one core course in a seminar section of about 40 students, allowing for significant individualized skills training. Our goal is to help students cultivate the ability to think clearly, analyze problems thoroughly and carefully, and recognize that no legal issue exists in a social, philosophical, economic, or political vacuum. Students participate in Fundamentals of Law Practice, a program structured to fully develop writing, analytic and research abilities, as well as the art of written and oral persuasion. An Academic Success Program, combining an early-start summer course with a series of support workshops, helps students reach their potential. This contributes to our exceptionally high retention rate between the first and second year.
Our upper-class curriculum bridges the gap between law school and law practice, making law school something students enjoy, not merely endure. Students create individualized programs, choosing from approximately 240 electives in 19 concentrations and areas of interest. Five Certificate Programs (in Business, Criminal, Intellectual Property, International, and Real Estate Law) recognize a student's depth of study and proficiency in these practice areas. Nearly 60 percent of all students and 75 percent of full-time students participate in one or more of our 28 clinics and externships. This includes over 400 students enrolled this year in one of our in-house clinics, and over 700 students participating in externships in legal departments and judicial chambers, experiencing the law in real time. Simulation courses enrolled nearly 1,100 students this past year.
Consistently recognized as among the country's top law schools in supporting public interest law, Brooklyn's Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Program has placed some 475 students in a wide array of summer internships at leading public interest organizations nationwide and abroad. Public Service Grants support public service employment. The Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law, and its Fellowship Program, provide a rewarding educational experience for those pursuing careers in that field. A Trade Secrets Initiative provides coverage of key trade secrets cases and related legislative/regulatory developments world-wide. Two Fellows, selected annually, research, update, and maintain the database. An International Human Rights Fellowship Program awards stipends for summer internships allowing students to work with prestigious human rights organizations overseas. Global Justice Fellowships are funded by the student-run International Law Society. We sponsor four student-edited journals: the Brooklyn Law Review, the Journal of Law and Policy, the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, and the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial, and Commercial Law. Zaretsky Bankruptcy and Commercial Law Fellowships are awarded to students based on demonstrated academic achievement and commitment to those areas of law. Over the past decade, our Moot Court teams have garnered 20 national championships and 39 other first-place prizes. Our Center for the Study of Law, Language, and Cognition explores how developments in the cognitive sciences—including neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics—have dramatic implications for the theory and practice of law. Our Center for Health, Science, and Public Policy engages students in the legal issues and public policy concerns confronting health care organizations. Joint-degree options allow students to concurrently earn master's degrees in business administration, city and regional planning, urban planning, political science, or library and information science. Finally, we offer exchange programs in Argentina, England, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Israel, as well as summer study-abroad programs in China and Italy.
Admission to Brooklyn Law School is based on an appraisal of each applicant's character and fitness, commitment to legal education, academic achievement, aptitude for successful law study, life experience, and other pertinent indications of professional promise. BLS does not offer an LSAT/GPA admission profile; numbers alone cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of a candidate's potential for law school success. While matrices may be helpful, too often they discourage those with profiles slightly below published numerical benchmarks who may still be competitive for admission. Moreover, such profiles reduce the selection process to a two-dimensional matrix, which fails to portray accurately our admission practices. To be sure, candidates with high test scores and commensurate grades are more likely to gain admission than those with lower grades and scores. Nevertheless, no combination of grades and scores guarantees admission. Nonquantifiable factors also significantly influence our decisions. A partial list includes quality of schools attended, strength of the program of study, grade trends, content of faculty recommendations, cogency of the candidate's writing, campus leadership, significant service to the community, nature and quality of any work experience or foreign study/travel, awards and honors, and military service. We have a century-long tradition of offering opportunities to members of underrepresented groups.