Georgetown University Law Center

History

Opened as Georgetown Law School in 1870, Georgetown Law was the second (after St. Louis University) law school run by a Jesuit institution within the United States. Georgetown Law has been separate from the main Georgetown campus (in the neighborhood of Georgetown) since 1890, when it moved near what is now Chinatown.

The Law Center campus is located on New Jersey Avenue, within a mile from the Capitol, and a few blocks west of Washington Union Station. Georgetown Law School changed its name to Georgetown University Law Center in 1953. The school added the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library in 1989 and the Gewirz Student Center in 1993, providing on-campus living for the first time. The "Campus Completion Project" finished in 2004 with the addition of the Hotung International Building and the Sport and Fitness Center.

Georgetown Law's original wall (or sign) is preserved on the quad of the present-day campus.

Controversies

In January 2022, Ilya Shapiro, the incoming executive director and senior lecturer of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, wrote in a tweet that he opposed President Biden's intent to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court, writing that because Biden would not nominate Shapiro's friend Sri Srinivasan, he was choosing a "lesser black woman". The dean of Georgetown University Law Center condemned the remarks, stating, "The tweets' suggestion that the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman and their use of demeaning language are appalling...The tweets are at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law". Shapiro later deleted the tweet, as well as many others he had written in the past, and issued a statement calling it an "inartful tweet." Shapiro was then placed on administrative leave while being investigated for violations of "professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment" rules. As a result of the investigation, Shapiro was reinstated, as the school's investigators found that he was "not properly subject to discipline". Nevertheless, on June 6, Shapiro chose to resign in protest, arguing that the school had "implicitly repealed Georgetown's vaunted Speech and Expression Policy and set me up for discipline the next time I transgress progressive orthodoxy".

Academics

Admissions and costs

For the class entering in fall of 2025, the school received over 14,000 applications for 650 spots. For the class entering in the fall of 2024, 2,276 out of 11,309 J.D. applicants (20.13%) were offered admission, with 625 (27.46%) matriculating. The median LSAT score for the class entering in fall of 2024 is 171 and the median undergraduate GPA is 3.92. In the 2024–25 academic year, Georgetown Law had 2,176 J.D. students, of whom 32% were minorities and 56% were female.

The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) at Georgetown Law for the 2024–25 academic year was $113,450. The Law School Transparency estimated that the debt-financed cost of attendance for three years was $419,938.

Publications

Georgetown University Law Center publishes fourteen student-run law journals, two peer-reviewed law journals, and a weekly student-run newspaper, the Georgetown Law Weekly. The journals are:

American Criminal Law Review

Food and Drug Law Journal

Georgetown Environmental Law Review

Georgetown Immigration Law Journal

Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law

Georgetown Journal of International Law

Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives

Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy

Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics

Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy

Journal of National Security Law and Policy

Georgetown Law Technology Review (online only)

Georgetown Law Journal

Clinics

Georgetown's clinics are: Appellate Litigation Clinic, Center for Applied Legal Studies, The Community Justice Project, Criminal Defense & Prisoner Advocacy Clinic, Criminal Justice Clinic, D.C. Law Students in Court, D.C. Street Law Program, Domestic Violence Clinic, Federal Legislation and Administrative Clinic, Harrison Institute for Housing & Community Development Clinic, Harrison Institute for Public Law, Institute for Public Representation, International Women's Human Rights Clinic, Juvenile Justice Clinic, Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic, and Communications and Technology Law Clinic.

In the Winter 2017 edition of The National Jurist, Georgetown Law's Moot Court Program was ranked #4 in the country for 2015–16 and #5 among U.S. law schools that have had the best moot courts this past decade. Georgetown Law participates in moot court competitions through its Barristers' Council, which has Alternative Dispute Resolution, Appellate, and Trial divisions.

Directed by Professor Erica Hashimoto (following 36 years of leadership by Professor Steven H. Goldblatt), the Appellate Litigation Clinic operates akin to a small appellate litigation firm. It has had four cases reach the United States Supreme Court on grants of writs of certiorari. One such case was Wright v. West, 505 U.S. 277 (1992), considered in habeas corpus the question whether the de novo review standard for mixed questions of law and fact established in 1953 (the Brown v. Allen standard) should be overruled. Another was Smith v. Barry, 502 U.S. 244 (1992), which reversed a Fourth Circuit determination that the court did not have jurisdiction over an appeal because the defendant's pro se brief could not serve as a timely notice of appeal.

CALS represents refugees seeking political asylum in the United States because of threatened persecution in their home countries. Students in CALS assume primary responsibility for the representation of these refugees, whose requests for asylum have already been rejected by the U.S. government. The Center for Applied Legal Studies was founded in the 1980s by Philip Schrag. Until 1995, the Clinic heard cases in the field of consumer protection. Under the direction of Schrag and Andrew Schoenholtz, the Clinic began specializing in asylum claims, for both detained and non-detained applicants. In conjunction with their work for the Clinic, Schrag and Schoenholtz have written books about America's political asylum system, with the help of Clinic fellows and graduate students. The duo's most recent book, Lives in the Balance, was published in 2014 and provides an empirical analysis of how Homeland Security decided asylum cases over a recent fourteen-year period. The group's work in human rights law has met praise from international organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Council. Under the direction of Schrag and Schoenholtz, the clinic has also focused on more prolonged displacement situations for political refugees.

Campus

The Law Center is located in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C. It is bounded by 2nd St. NW to the west, E St. NW to the south, 1st St. NW and New Jersey Avenue to the east, and Massachusetts Avenue to the north.

The Georgetown Law Library supports the research and educational endeavors of the students and faculty of Georgetown University Law Center. It is the second-largest law library in the United States, and the Law Library houses the nation's fourth-largest law library collection and offers access to thousands of online publications. In 2010, the Law Library was ranked by The National Jurist as the 14th-best law library in the nation.

Reception

Bar examination passage

In 2024, the overall bar examination passage rate for the law school's first-time examination takers was 93.05%. The Ultimate Bar Pass Rate, which the ABA defines as the passage rate for graduates who sat for bar examinations within two years of graduating, was 97.17% for the class of 2021 and 94.14% for the class of 2022.

Employment outcomes

Of the 691 J.D. graduates in the Georgetown Law class of 2020 (including both full- and part-time students), 569 (82.3%) held long-term, full-time positions that required bar exam passage (i.e., jobs as lawyers) and were not school-funded nine months after graduation. 644 graduates overall (93.2%) were employed, 6 graduates (0.9%) were pursuing a graduate degree, and 34 graduates (4.9%) were unemployed.

435 J.D. graduates (63.0%) were employed in the private sector, with 368 (53.3%) at law firms with over 250 attorneys. 208 graduates (30.1%) entered the public sector, with 80 (11.6%) employed in public interest positions, 55 (8.0%) employed by the government, 68 (9.8%) in federal or state clerkships, and 5 (0.7%) in academic positions. 35 graduates (5.1%) received funding from Georgetown Law for their positions.

The median reported starting salary for a 2018 J.D. graduate in the private sector was $180,000. The median reported starting salary for a 2018 graduate in the public sector (including government, public interest, and clerkship positions) was $57,000.

272 J.D. graduates (39.4%) in the class of 2020 were employed in Washington, DC, 155 (22.4%) in New York, and 31 (4.5%) in California. 13 (1.9%) were employed outside the United States.

As of 2011, Georgetown Law alumni account for the second highest number of partners at NLJ 100 firms. It is among the top ten feeder schools in eight of the ten largest legal markets in the United States by law job openings (New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, San Francisco, and San Diego), again giving it the second-widest reach of all law schools. The school performs especially strongly in its home market, where it is the largest law school and has produced the greatest number of NLJ 100 partners.

Georgetown Law was ranked #11 for placing the highest percentage of 2018 J.D. graduates into associate positions at the 100 largest law firms.

Rankings

Georgetown Law is part of the T14, a classification of American law schools that frequently claim the Top 14 spots in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings. Recent rankings include:

Law school rankings

#14 (tie) - U.S. News & World Report (2025)

#10 (US) and #13 (Global) - The Academic Ranking of World Universities (2025)

#8 (US) and #17 (Global) - Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings (2025)

#9 (US) and #26 (Global) - QS World University Rankings (2025)

#11 (tie) - The New York Times: Law School Rankings (2024)

U.S. News & World Report specialty rankings 2025

#1 Clinical Training

#3 Tax Law

#3 International Law

#6 Healthcare Law

#9 (tie) Criminal Law

#9 Intellectual Property Law

#11 Constitutional Law

#11 (tie) Contracts/Commercial Law

#12 (tie) Business/Corporate Law

Other rankings

#8 Law School for the Most Graduates at Big Law Firms - U.S. News & World Report (2025)

People

Faculty

Notable current faculty include:

Charles F. Abernathy, professor of civil rights and comparative law

Lama Abu-Odeh, Palestinian-American scholar of Islamic law, family law, and feminism

Randy Barnett, Libertarian constitutional law scholar, author of The Structure of Liberty and Restoring the Lost Constitution, 2008 Guggenheim Fellow

M. Gregg Bloche, professor of public health policy

Rosa Brooks, professor of national security, military, and international law, columnist for Foreign Policy

Paul Butler, professor of criminal law and civil rights, expert on jury nullification

Sheryll D. Cashin, professor of civil rights and housing law

Paul Clement, former solicitor general of the United States

Julie E. Cohen, professor of copyright, intellectual property, and privacy law

David D. Cole, professor of first amendment and criminal procedure law

Peter Edelman, former assistant secretary of Health and Human Services

Doug Emhoff, Distinguished Visitor from Practice, Distinguished Fellow of Georgetown Law's Institute for Technology Law and Policy, Second Gentleman of the United States, entertainment lawyer

Heidi Li Feldman, professor of law