About the School
New York Law School, one of the oldest independent law schools in the United States, was founded in 1891 by the faculty, students, and alumni of Columbia College Law School led by their founding dean, Theodore Dwight, a major figure in the history of legal education. In 1904, the Law School established one of the nation's first evening divisions to provide those in the workforce, or with family obligations, a flexible alternative to full-time legal studies.
From its inception, New York Law School's lower Manhattan location, in the midst of the country's largest concentration of government agencies, courts, law firms, banks, corporate headquarters, and securities exchanges, has made immersion in the legal life of a great city an essential part of the School's identity and curriculum.
The Law School offers the course of study leading to the J.D. degree through full-time day and part-time evening divisions. In 2003, the Law School began offering the Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Taxation, becoming one of the only law schools in the New York City area to offer this advanced training to tax attorneys. In 2009, the School also began offering an LL.M. in Real Estate and an LL.M. in Financial Services Law, as well as a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Mental Disability Law Studies. In 2012, the Law School will begin offering the LL.M. in American Business Law.
New York Law School's continued vitality springs from the Faculty's active commitment first to legal education and scholarship, but also to the profession; from the talent and energy of its students and alumni; and from a curriculum that infuses theoretical analysis with the strategic and ethical questions that make the practice of law an unending challenge.
A full-time faculty of approximately 94 men and women is joined by a first-rate adjunct faculty, consisting of attorneys, judges, and other public officials who offer many elective courses each year in the various fields of their expertise. Approximately 1,765 J.D. students, most of them entering right after college, study at the Law School. In the Evening Division, many of the students have established careers in other fields. New York Law School students are 54 percent women, and 33 percent self-identified minority (in the entering class of 2011). The students' rich diversity of life experiences makes it possible to find easily among them those who are the first to pursue a graduate education as well those who are the second or third generation in their families to do so.
The Law School's curriculum is distinguished by its systematic effort to integrate the study of theory and practice and to include the perspectives of legal practitioners. The Law School's unique skills-based curriculum offers clinics, simulation courses, externships, project-based learning courses, and a new first-year Legal Practice program to carry out that goal. Further, to that end, the faculty established nine academic centers which provide specialized study and offer prime opportunity for exchange between the students and expert practitioners:
- Center for Business Law & Policy
- Center on Financial Services Law
- Center for New York City Law
- Center for Professional Values and Practice
- Center for Real Estate Studies
- C.V. Starr Center for International Law
- Diane Abbey Law Center for Children and Families
- Institute for Information Law & Policy
- Justice Action Center
Today, the nine academic centers engage many of our students in advanced research through the John Marshall Harlan Scholars Program, a rigorous academic honors program designed for students with the strongest academic credentials. Harlan Scholars have the opportunity, through affiliation with one of the academic centers, to focus on a particular field of study, gaining depth and substantive expertise beyond the broad understanding of the law that is gained in the J.D. program.
