Brooklyn Law School

The Law Campus

Situated at the junction of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, the Brooklyn Civic Center, and downtown Brooklyn, our school boasts a location unrivaled for its legal, cultural, and historical character. Students share their environs with federal and state judges, government officials, and lawyers in private practice, many of them alumni. Within a few-block radius are the US District Court; US Bankruptcy Court; US Attorney’s Office; the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division; Family Court; the Brooklyn District Attorney; the Kings County Surrogate’s Court; the New York City Civil and Criminal Courts; the Legal Aid Society; and numerous law firms and technology start-up companies. These are our laboratories, a backdrop for learning few schools can replicate.

Our Neighborhood

Overlooking New York Harbor and Lower Manhattan lies Brooklyn’s most charming neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, the first New York City neighborhood to be designated as a historic district and where you will find much of our campus. Many of our students and faculty live here in our residence hall or in private apartments and homes located on graceful, tree-lined streets, where many original townhouses, brownstone mansions, carriage houses, churches, and public buildings recall old-world urban elegance. Nearby neighborhoods—Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, Williamsburg, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass)—offer trendy, affordable housing and a profusion of bistros, boutiques, galleries, and clubs, all contributing to GQ magazine citing Brooklyn as the “Coolest City on the Planet.” Brooklyn has been hailed as the new center of New York City’s energy. The Tech Triangle, bounded by DUMBO, the Navy Yard, and Downtown Brooklyn, is a magnet for hundreds of pioneering, energetic, and creative entrepreneurs, makers, artisans, and tech- and digital-driven firms. Clearly, Brooklyn possesses the attributes to support its growing reputation as the hippest part of New York City.

Manhattan at Our Doorstep

Minutes away is the financial, legal, business, and cultural crossroads of the world: Manhattan. Proximity to Wall Street and the Financial District gives students easy access to school-year externships and summer jobs with major law firms and financial institutions. Students enjoy a great campus in a dynamic urban environment, softened by a small-neighborhood feel. This is New York City on a human scale—Manhattan without the hassle.

Campus as Community

Our state-of-the-art 21-story high-rise, Feil Hall, allows us to guarantee housing to virtually all first-year students, engendering a strong sense of campus community. The library offers a large collection of both print and electronic materials to support the curriculum and research, including hundreds of databases accessible on and off campus. The large, modern space boasts a wide variety of comfortable spaces for study, with seating for approximately 600 students, 25 group-study rooms, and 5 computer labs. With a focus on service, an ever-increasing number of resources in electronic format, and long hours, the library provides students with an excellent environment for both study and research. We offer 2,400 other student-accessible wired network connections, as well as wireless network connections throughout our academic and residential buildings.

Our Faculty: Diverse, Brilliant, and User-Friendly

Our 69 full-time faculty members, joined by over 168 adjuncts (including many distinguished judges, practitioners, and corporate counsel) are extraordinarily talented and, above all, superb teachers. Shaping public policy and making law in the community at large, they are also prolific authors. They are recognized nationally and globally for their scholarship in such areas as Capital Defender and Criminal Law, Commercial and Bankruptcy Law, Corporate and Securities Law, Evidence, Family Law, Gender Discrimination, Human Rights, Information Privacy and Internet Law, Intellectual Property, International Business Law, Tax, and Torts. BLS offers a congenial community. Its learning environment, while rigorous and challenging, remains supportive and nurturing. Faculty members are accessible to students in a way that few faculties are. There is a strong correlation between the priority we assign to teaching and mentoring and student success on the bar examination. Our graduates who took the July 2017 New York State Bar Examination for the first time had a 78.6 percent passing rate, surpassing the statewide pass rate for graduates of ABA-approved law schools.

Alumni: Accomplished and Accessible

One of our great strengths is the size, stature, and loyalty of our more than 23,000 graduates in 49 states and Washington, DC; 3 US territories; and 37 countries—among the largest alumni families of any law school.

Our Students: The Best and the Brightest

The 2017 entering class included students from 34 states (including the District of Columbia and US territories) and 8 foreign countries. Our entering students are graduates of 192 colleges and universities, speak 34 languages other than English, and represent 71 different academic majors. Two-thirds of them took at least a year to work, travel, or volunteer after completing their undergraduate studies. The class has 31 percent students of color, and 52 percent of the class are women.

The Career Development Center

The experienced staff in the Career Development Center includes a dean, a deputy director, a professional development manager, a director of employer relations, and three associate directors, all of whom bring multifaceted experience in legal recruiting and professional development to the office. Through early outreach, an individualized approach to counseling, and comprehensive career development programs, the office is committed to providing student and alumni candidates with the building blocks necessary for a rewarding legal career.

The Career Development Center helps students and graduates explore the wide variety of practice areas and emerging fields of law and to determine individual skills and interests. Students are guided along their career paths from the first semester, through graduation, and beyond. Through this rigorous approach to career development, graduates continue to find employment with a wide range of employers in the public and private sector. For our current employment statistics, please visit our graduate Employment Summary.

Brooklyn 2-3-4

Flexible enrollment options include traditional three- and four-year programs (fall entry only), as well as an innovative accelerated two-year JD option that starts in May. Full-time students take one core course in a seminar section of about 40 students, which allows for significant individualized skills training. Our goal is to help students cultivate the ability to think clearly, analyze problems thoroughly and carefully, and recognize that no legal issue exists in a social, philosophical, economic, or political vacuum. Students participate in Fundamentals of Law Practice, a program structured to fully develop writing, analytic, and research abilities, as well as the art of written and oral persuasion. Our Academic Success Program, combining an early-start summer course with a series of support workshops, helps students reach their potential. This contributes to our exceptionally high retention rate between the first and second year.

Our upper-class curriculum aims at making our graduates practice-ready, equipped with the knowledge and real lawyering skills that foster success in the workforce—wherever their professional passion takes them. Students create individualized programs, choosing from approximately 240 electives in 19 concentrations and areas of interest. Six Certificate Programs (in Business, Criminal, Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, International, and Real Estate Law) recognize a student’s depth of study and proficiency in these practice areas.

Every year, approximately 350 students participate in at least one of more than 30 clinics and externships. Brooklyn Law School’s Clinical Education Program, comprised of a broad array of in-house clinics and externships, is one of the most diverse, extensive, and comprehensive in the country. An integral component of the upper-class curriculum, every student must take at least one “real world” clinic or externship to graduate.

Our program takes full advantage of our ideal location, extending the campus to every state and federal courthouse and hundreds of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, law offices, and businesses and companies throughout New York City. In downtown Brooklyn alone, the Law School is within walking distance of the US Courthouse, the New York State Supreme Court, the New York City Criminal and Family Courts, and the Appellate Division, Second Department. We are also in the middle of the exciting Brooklyn Tech Triangle.

Since it was launched in 1997, the Safe Harbor Project has secured asylum and/or related humanitarian relief for 125 principal applicants in both the Asylum Office and Immigration Court. The Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy (BLIP) Clinic functions as a modern, technology-oriented law firm. Since its inception in 2008, BLIP is training a new generation of lawyers who are well-versed across the spectrum of skills needed to represent emerging tech, Internet, communications, and new media companies. Our Corporate and Real Estate Clinic provides free legal assistance for financially distressed low-income cooperatives (also known as Housing Development Fund Corporations or HDFC’s) where many of the city’s affordable units are found. Approximately 25 of these co-ops in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx—representing over 400 units of housing—receive help each year from 8 to 10 students each semester.

In addition to clinics and externships, Brooklyn Law School has over two dozen student-run pro bono projects that cover a wide range of areas, including nationwide projects such as the National Lawyers Guild’s Legal Observation at Protests, citywide projects such as the Suspension Representation Project, and projects unique to BLS such as the Foreclosure Legal Assistance Group. Pro bono projects span a range of practice areas and populations, including working with alleged debtors, domestic violence survivors, entrepreneurs, immigrants, public benefits recipients, students, and veterans. We also host an alternative spring break where students engage in public service in cities nationwide. The Public Service Law Center is also always open to students interested in starting new projects.

Beyond the Core Curriculum

Consistently recognized as among the country’s top law schools in supporting public interest law, Brooklyn’s Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Program has placed nearly 550 students in a wide array of summer internships at leading public interest organizations nationwide and abroad. Our Public Interest/Public Service (PipS) Program and Public Service Grants support employment in these areas. The Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law and its Fellowship Program provide a rewarding educational experience for those pursuing careers in that field. A Trade Secrets Initiative provides coverage of key trade secrets cases and related legislative/regulatory developments worldwide. Two fellows, selected annually, research, update, and maintain the database. An International Human Rights Fellowship Program awards stipends for summer internships allowing students to work with prestigious human rights organizations overseas, while two Global Justice Fellowships are funded by the student-run International Law Society, one of 40 such organizations on campus. We sponsor four student-edited journals: the Brooklyn Law Review, the Journal of Law and Policy, the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, and the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial, and Commercial Law. Zaretsky Bankruptcy and Commercial Law Fellowships are awarded to students based on demonstrated academic achievement and commitment to those areas of law. Over the past 16 years, our Moot Court teams have garnered 27 national championships and 55 other first-place prizes. Our Center for the Study of Law, Language, and Cognition explores how developments in the cognitive sciences—including neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics—have dramatic implications for the theory and practice of law. Our Center for Health, Science, and Public Policy engages students in the legal issues and public policy concerns confronting health care organizations.

Launched in 2016, Brooklyn Law School’s Public Service Law Center serves as a hub of resources and information related to public service programs, initiatives, and activities. The Center for Criminal Justice was launched by Brooklyn Law School in 2016 as a dynamic center that builds on the existing strengths of the school’s nationally recognized criminal law faculty and places the Law School at the center of critical conversations, education, and sharing of expertise on the most vital issues and topics in criminal justice law and policy today.

Joint-degree options allow students to concurrently earn master’s degrees in business administration, city and regional planning, urban planning, or library and information science. We offer exchange programs in Argentina, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Israel, as well as summer study-abroad programs in China and Italy, and a JD-LLM option with law schools in France, Germany, Ireland, and Spain. (The program in Germany offers a Master of Law and Business/MLB degree as well). Complementing our many business and tax course offerings, an intensive, team-taught Business Boot Camp introduces law students to the way business people approach and analyze problems. The Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE) builds on our integration within the Brooklyn Tech Triangle and is a hub for exploring legal issues surrounding start-ups (commercial and not-for-profit), providing them with effective legal representation and support, while training the next generation of business lawyers to advise and participate in those ventures.

APPLICANT PROFILE

Admission to Brooklyn Law School is based on an appraisal of each applicant’s character and fitness, commitment to legal education, academic achievement, aptitude for successful law study, life experience, and other pertinent indications of professional promise. BLS does not offer an LSAT/GPA admission profile; numbers alone cannot provide a comprehensive assessment of a candidate’s potential for law school success. While matrices may be helpful, too often they discourage those with profiles slightly below published numerical benchmarks who may still be competitive for admission. Moreover, such profiles reduce the selection process to a two-dimensional matrix, which fails to portray accurately our admission practices. To be sure, candidates with high test scores and commensurate grades are more likely to gain admission than those with lower grades and scores. Nevertheless, no combination of grades and scores guarantees admission. Nonquantifiable factors also significantly influence our decisions. A partial list includes quality of schools attended, strength of the program of study, grade trends, content of faculty recommendations, cogency of the candidate’s writing, campus leadership, significant service to the community, nature and quality of any work experience or foreign study/travel, awards and honors, and military service. We have a tradition, over a century long, of offering opportunities to members of underrepresented groups.