Academics
Boalt Hall has approximately 850 J.D. students, 100 students in the LL.M. and J.S.D. programs, and 45 students in the Ph.D. program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. The School also features specialized curricular programs in Business, Law and Economics, Comparative Legal Studies, Environmental Law, International Legal Studies, Law and Technology, and Social Justice.
The JD program's admissions process is highly selective. Boalt Hall is known to value high undergraduate GPAs, perhaps even more than high LSAT scores. Consequently, Berkeley has the fourth highest 75th percentile GPA, surpassed only by Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School. According to U.S. News and World Report, Boalt has the third-lowest acceptance rate among American law schools, with about 10% of applicants admitted; only Yale and Stanford have lower rates. Most recently, admitted applicants generally have an undergraduate GPA of between 3.7 and 3.9 and a Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score of between 165 and 170 (92nd and 98th percentile of all test-takers).
The student body is diverse and has an especially large Asian-American student population. Unlike peer law schools, which maintain close to male/female parity, the student body is consistently ~65% female.
Boalt's grading system for the JD program is unusual among law schools. Students are graded on a High Honors (HH), Honors (H), and Pass (P) scale. Approximately 60% of the students in each class receive a grade of Pass, 30% receive a grade of Honors, and the highest 10% receive a grade of High Honors; lower grades of Substandard Pass (or Pass Conditional, abbreviated PC) and No Credit (NC) may be awarded at the discretion of professors. The top student in each class or section receives the Jurisprudence Award, while the second-place student receives the Prosser Prize.
For a typical class in the JD program, the average age of admitted students is 24 years old, over a range of ages from 20 to 48 years old. Berkeley Law's tuition has increased in recent years. Currently, both in-state and non-resident tuition is costlier than the private Stanford Law School, which charges $47,460 annually.
The faculty of Berkeley Law also provide academic direction and the bulk of the instruction for the undergraduate program in Legal Studies, which is organized as a major in Letters and Science. The Legal Studies program is not intended as a pre-law program, but rather as a liberal arts program "that can encourage sustained reflection on fundamental values."
Berkeley Law has a chapter of the Order of the Coif, a national law school honorary society founded for the purposes of encouraging legal scholarship and advancing the ethical standards of the legal profession.
It is an American Bar Association approved law school since 1923. It joined the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 1912.
Read more about this topic: UC Berkeley School Of Law
Famous quotes containing the word academics:
“Our first line of defense in raising children with values is modeling good behavior ourselves. This is critical. How will our kids learn tolerance for others if our hearts are filled with hate? Learn compassion if we are indifferent? Perceive academics as important if soccer practice is a higher priority than homework?”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“Almost all scholarly research carries practical and political implications. Better that we should spell these out ourselves than leave that task to people with a vested interest in stressing only some of the implications and falsifying others. The idea that academics should remain “above the fray” only gives ideologues license to misuse our work.”
—Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944)