435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10027
Phone: 212.854.2670; Fax: 212.854.1109
E-mail: admissions@law.columbia.edu; Website: www.law.columbia.edu/admissions
Columbia Law School is distinguished, perhaps uniquely among leading US law schools, as an international center of legal education that stimulates its students to consider the full dimensions of the possibility of the law—as an intellectual pursuit, as a career, and as an instrument of human progress. The character of academic and social life at Columbia is fiercely democratic, dynamic, creative, and innovative. The Law School is especially committed to educating students of differing perspectives, from diverse backgrounds, and with varied life experiences.
Professional prospects for Columbia Law School graduates are quite extraordinary. Our graduates proceed to productive careers in every conceivable arena of practice, business, and advocacy. While Columbia-trained attorneys are especially well-regarded for their work in corporate law and finance, an unusually high number also serve as state and federal judges, prosecutors, civil rights and human rights advocates, legal scholars, public defenders, entrepreneurs, business executives, elected government officials, and national and international leaders. Many alumni contribute significantly to the shaping of US culture at large. Currently, our graduates serve in leadership roles across the fields of government, art, music, film, publishing, science, professional athletics, philanthropy, and higher education.
With an exceptionally talented student body and faculty and a strong tradition of encouraging students with specialized interests to develop those interests in depth, Columbia Law School provides a legal education that gives our students a singular capacity for imagination, originality, and high responsibility in their professional lives.
Columbia continues to place among the handful of the most highly selective JD programs in our nation—as evaluated by the principal criteria used to measure admission selectivity (application volume, acceptance rates, LSAT scores, and academic performance). Indeed, in recent years, the demand for a Columbia legal education has never been greater, and the academic credentials of our entering classes are stronger than ever. Columbia's JD student body is further distinguished by standing as one of the most culturally diverse among America's leading law schools. Men and women choosing to study law at Columbia hail from the small towns, farms, and suburbs of the West, Midwest, and South; the industrial corridors and ivy halls of the Northeast; the inner cities of every major US metropolis; and the international centers of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Each entering class reflects the broad range of economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds found in the United States. And from around the world, we welcome students who will enrich learning at Columbia and thereafter advance the developing legal cultures of their homelands.
With one of the largest percentages of international students in its JD program of any leading law school; with one of the very highest percentages of students of color; with its students hailing from 48 states, roughly 43 foreign countries, and more than 200 different colleges and universities; and with 15 percent of its JD students having earned at least one graduate or professional degree before studying law, Columbia's student body abounds with a diversity of life experiences, cultural backgrounds, and intellectual perspectives.
Columbia Law School's main building, Jerome Greene Hall, has undergone significant expansion and improvements devoted primarily to our students, including library renovations and the creation of a student commons that includes a student lounge and café. New seminar rooms and state-of-the-art multimedia classrooms have also been designed to provide students with full Internet and other legal research access. Across the street from Greene Hall is William C. Warren Hall, home to the Columbia Law Review, Morningside Heights Legal Services (a law school clinic serving our community), and the Center for Public Interest Law.
William and June Warren Hall includes amphitheater-style classrooms equipped with modern teaching resources, a center for the law school's international programs, and conference facilities. It is also home to the offices of Admissions, Financial Aid, Registration Services, Student Services, Graduate Legal Studies, and International Programs.
The expansion of the law school's facilities has greatly enhanced the quality of life and learning at Columbia. Students have a superb learning environment that is conducive to community building and social and intellectual engagement, and reflects the changing nature of legal education in the twenty-first century.
Columbia's library is one of the largest and most comprehensive law collections in the world. It is especially rich in US law and legal history, international law, comparative law, Roman law, and the legal literature of the major European countries, China, and Japan. Access to the Internet and electronic documents provide additional resources, with materials from Germany, South Africa, and a wide range of international organizations. In addition, the many libraries of the university, containing more than seven million volumes, are available to law students.
The law library's online catalog provides complete access to the library's collection, acts as an index to the major legal serials, and provides access to the online catalogs of other major law school libraries. Columbia provides its law students with some of the most sophisticated technologies of any law school in the nation.
The foundation of the JD program consists of Legal Methods (an intensive three-week introductory course), Legal Practice Workshop (a two-semester course that provides training in legal research, writing, and analysis), Contracts, Torts, Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Property, Criminal Law, Foundation Year Moot Court, and one elective focusing on the law's engagement with public policy, the intellectual and historical foundations of the rule of law, or the law's transnational and comparative expression. Recent elective offerings have included Art of Legal Persuasion; Critical Legal Thought; Foundations of the Regulatory State; Law and Contemporary Society; Law and Economics; Law and Social Science; Lawyering Across Multiple Legal Orders; Legislation; Principles of Intellectual Property; Regulation: Decentralization and Globalization; the Regulatory and Administrative State; the Rule of Law: Perspectives and Philosophy; and Terror and Consent.
Columbia has a special commitment to clinical education, which places the student in the role of a lawyer doing a lawyer's actual work under intensive faculty supervision. Some examples of clinical opportunities are Lawyering in the Digital Age, Nonprofit Organizations/Small Business, Child Advocacy, Mediation, Environmental Law, Human Rights, and a clinic in Sexuality and Gender Law, the first clinic of its type in the nation. Unique to Columbia is a summer program that places more than 150 students in civil and human rights internships in law firms and organizations throughout this country and around the world. Especially distinguished are Columbia's offerings in international, foreign, and comparative law; constitutional law and theory; corporate and securities law; intellectual property; critical race theory; human rights; and public interest law.
Research centers and special programs include the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts; Julius Silver Program in Law, Science, and Technology; Center for Climate Change Law; Center for Law and Philosophy; Center for Law and Economic Studies; Center for the Study of Law and Culture; Center for Public Interest Law; Program on Careers in Law and Teaching; Human Rights Institute; Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law; Center for Chinese Legal Studies; Center for Japanese Legal Studies; Center for Korean Legal Studies; European Legal Studies Center; Center for Contract and Economic Organization; Center on Corporate Governance; Center on Crime, Community, and the Law; Center on Global Legal Problems; Center for Institutional and Social Change; Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment; Social Justice Initiatives; and the Charles Evans Gerber Transactional Studies Program.
All first-year students enter in mid-August. Candidates applying for regular admission should apply after September 1 of the year preceding their desired matriculation, but before February 15, the application deadline. Early Decision candidates must complete their applications by November 15 and are notified in December. All other applications are generally reviewed in the order in which they are completed, and decisions are made and sent out on a rolling basis.