William & Mary Law School | |
---|---|
Parent school | College of William & Mary |
Established | 1779 |
School type | Public law school |
Endowment | $101.3 million |
Parent endowment | $1.3 billion |
Dean | A. Benjamin Spencer |
Location | Williamsburg, Virginia, U.S. 37°15′55″N76°42′18″W / 37.26528°N 76.70500°W |
Enrollment | 606 [1] |
Faculty | 44 (full–time) 118 (part–time) [1] |
USNWR ranking | 36th (tie) (2024) [2] |
Website | law.wm.edu |
ABA profile | ABA Profile |
William & Mary Law School, formally the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, is the law school of the College of William & Mary, a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is the oldest extant law school in the United States, having been founded in 1779 at the urging of alumnus Thomas Jefferson. [lower-alpha 1] [3] [4] As of 2023, it has an enrollment of 606 full-time students seeking a Juris Doctor (J.D.) or a Master of Laws (LL.M.) in the American Legal System, a two or three semester program for lawyers trained outside the United States. [1]
William & Mary Law School was founded in 1779 at the impetus of Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson, an alumnus of the university, during the reorganization of the originally royal institution, transforming the college of William and Mary into the first university in the United States. At Jefferson's urging, the governing board of visitors of William & Mary established a chair of law and appointed George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, and Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, its first holder. (In the English-speaking world, older law professorships include the chair at Oxford University, first held by William Blackstone, the chair at Edinburgh University's School of Law (1709), and the Regius Chair of Law at Glasgow University).
Before filling the chair of law at William & Mary, Wythe tutored numerous students in the subject, including Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. John Marshall, who became Chief Justice of the United States in 1801, received his only formal legal education when he attended Wythe's lectures at William & Mary in 1780. St. George Tucker, who succeeded Wythe as Professor of Law and edited the seminal early American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, also was one of Wythe's students.
The growth of the school was halted abruptly by the beginning of the American Civil War. The start of military campaigns on the Virginia Peninsula compelled William & Mary to close its doors. It would be another sixty years before the historical priority in law could be revived in a modern program that is now nearly ninety years old.
After William & Mary Law School was reopened early in the twentieth century (1921), it was moved around the main campus of the university to several different buildings in succession. In 1980, the school was moved to its current location on the outskirts of Colonial Williamsburg, a short distance from the main campus. The building has been renovated several times since 1980, with the addition of a new wing of classrooms and renovation of older classrooms in 2000, the opening of the Henry C. Wolf Law Library, the construction of a new admission suite, and the addition of the James A. and Robin L. Hixon Center for Experiential Learning and Leadership (dedicated in 2017).
A. Benjamin Spencer, a nationally renowned civil procedure and federal courts expert and former professor of law at the University of Virginia, is the current dean and Chancellor Professor at William & Mary Law School. Named on July 1, 2020, he is William & Mary's first African-American dean of any school at the university, including the law school. [5] W. Taylor Reveley III, formerly managing partner of the law firm of Hunton & Williams, is a former dean of the law school. He served as the 27th president of William & Mary from September 5, 2008, to June 30, 2018, after serving as interim president since February 2008. Davison M. Douglas served as dean from July 2009 through June 30, 2020. The former chancellor of William & Mary, Sandra Day O'Connor, delivered commencement remarks to the graduating class of the school in 2006, 2008 and 2010. [6]
Tuition at William & Mary for the 2023-24 academic year is $36,418 for Virginia residents and $58,604 for non-residents. [7] Approximately 97% of students received financial aid (2022). Law School Transparency estimated debt-financed cost of attendance for three years, based on data from the 2022-2023 academic year, is $179,472 for residents; the estimated cost for non-residents is $232,692. [8]
According to William & Mary's official 2022 ABA-required disclosures, 92% of the Class of 2022 obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required or JD-advantaged, non-school funded employment nine months after graduation. [9] William & Mary's Law School Transparency under-employment score is 10%, indicating the percentage of the Class of 2018 unemployed, pursuing an additional degree, or working in a non-professional, short-term, or part-time job nine months after graduation, with 0% of the class in school-funded jobs. [10]
In 2019, William & Mary Law School came in 11th among all U.S. law schools in percentage of graduates that secured full-time, long-term federal judicial clerkships, often seen as the most prestigious clerkships law graduates can obtain. [11]
W&M Law was ranked 24th on the Above the Law ranking in 2019. U.S. News ranked W&M Law as tied for the 30th place in their latest 2023 rankings of the nation's law schools. [12] For the Class of 2025 (enrolled as of October 1, 2022), the median undergraduate GPA was 3.75 and the median LSAT score was 165. [13]
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