A solid legal education is always demanding. But it should also be exciting, challenging, and an investment in your own and society's future.
Legal education at the Washington College of Law is centered on a commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship. This dedication has persuaded many of our faculty to come to WCL from distinguished careers with leading law firms, in public service, or at other law schools.
Dedication to education is evident in our small classes, even in the first year. First-year sections have approximately 85 students in most substantive classes. Legal Rhetoric: Writing and Research, a four-credit, year-long course on legal research and writing skills, is taught in sections of 12-23 students. These notably small sections foster close faculty-student interaction from the first year, something that can be said of few major law schools. Upper-level classes average 40 students, and seminars typically enroll 14 students each.
The quality of education at WCL is evidenced, for example, in one of the oldest, most comprehensive, and best-supervised clinical programs in the nation, and in one of the nation's largest international law programs, with its accompanying student-edited journal. You will find curricular strengths in many other areas--administrative and regulatory law, corporate law, taxation, property and environmental law, intellectual property law, and public interest law, as well as jurisprudence and legal history.
But education at WCL is more than legal instruction. Built on a strong academic foundation, the courses and activities are also designed to treat the student as a complete person. Our approach is not the usual extremely competitive approach to lawyering. Instead, as former dean Professor Elliott Milstein puts it, "WCL is a humane and decent place with a rich curriculum, a multitude of teaching styles, a supportive and cooperative student body, and wonderful opportunities for learning both within and outside the classroom."
