Yale Law School is one of the professional schools of Yale University, based in New Haven, Connecticut. Yale Law is regarded as one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. According to unofficial newspaper rankings (such as US News), it is the most selective law school in the United States, above Harvard Law School.
Famous alumni include Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Reva Siegel , Pat Robertson, Steven Brill, Clarence Thomas, and Gerald Ford.
It offers the following degrees: J.D., LL.M., M.S.L. , J.S.D. . It also has a visiting scholars program and is home to a number of legal research centers.
Yale Law School (YLS) is often considered to be the most prestigious law school in America, trumping even Harvard in most rankings, including the closely-watched US News rankings. Its class, at about 200, is considerably smaller than Harvard Law's and its student to faculty ratio, at 7.5, is the lowest of any law school in the US. More of its graduates take judicial clerkships than at any other school (38%) and more go to academia than at most schools (4%).
Its curriculum is generally less geared toward corporate/commercial law than other leading schools like Columbia, NYU, and Harvard. YLS is also known for requiring very strong non-numerical credentials, although the GPA and LSAT score of its class are nonetheless the highest in the country. A quarter of the class that entered in 2003 had GPA's at or above 3.97 and a quarter had LSAT's at or above 175, out of 180 possible points.
YLS does not have traditional grades. It evaluates second-semester first year and second and third year students on an Honors/Pass/Fail system and first-semester first years on a simple Credit/No Credit system. It also does not rank its students. YLS publishes 9 law journals which, unlike those at most other schools, accept student editors without a competition.
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 began in 1995.
A picture of the reconstruction:
A picture of the outside of the law building, which is in keeping with Yale's prevailing gothic style:
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