Harvard Law School (also known as
Harvard Law or HLS) is one of the professional graduate
schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the
oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the
largest academic law library in the world. The law school is currently ranked
as the second best law school in the United States by the U.S. News & World
and Report, only behind Yale Law School.
HLS
is unusually large for a law school; each class in the three-year J.D. program
has approximately 560 students, the largest of the top 150 ranked law schools
in the United States.
With a current enrollment of 1,741, HLS has about as many students its three
closest-ranked peer institutions (first-ranked Yale, third-ranked Stanford, and
fourth-ranked Chicago) combined. The first-year (1L) class is broken into seven
sections of approximately 80 students who take most first-year classes
together. Harvard's uniquely large class size and its prestige have led the law
school to graduate a great many distinguished alumni in the judiciary,
government, and the business world.
According
to Harvard Law's 2013 ABA-required disclosures, 86.9% of the Class of 2013
obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after
graduation.
Harvard Law School graduates have accounted for 568 judicial clerkships in the
past three years, including one-quarter of all Supreme Court clerkships.
Adjusted for its student body size (Harvard's class is roughly three times
bigger than those of most peer institutions), this put Harvard in second place,
with 1 percentage point more clerkships than third-place University of Chicago
Law School, and about half as many clerkships as Yale Law School.
Harvard
Law was founded by the estate of wealthy slaveholder Isaac Royal. Royal's
coat-of-arms, with its three stacked wheat sheaves, remains the school's crest
to this day. The current Dean of Harvard Law School is Martha Minow, who
assumed the role on July 1, 2009. The law school has 234 faculty members.
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