The University of Michigan Law School

The JD Program

Faculty

Michigan has more than 100 full-time faculty members who maintain a long tradition of eminence in constitutional, corporate, criminal, and international law. Further, the interdisciplinary breadth and depth of the faculty is reflected in an extraordinary range of expertise, including classics, economics, feminist theory, history, life sciences, natural resources, philosophy, political theory, and public policy. And with 10 legal practice faculty, 10 professors from practice, and 19 clinical professors, our faculty is as adept at experiential instruction as theory.

Curriculum and Clinical Opportunities

As one of the leaders in American legal education, Michigan’s curriculum is strong across the board. Students with interest in business, corporate, and securities; intellectual property; criminal; international; tax; constitutional; environmental; and public interest law should pay special attention to Michigan’s extensive offerings.

Recognized as preeminent in interdisciplinary legal studies, the insights and methods of many other fields are apparent throughout our broad curriculum. Formal dual-degree programs are available in 13 disciplines, while others are created ad hoc (sometimes with other institutions). Alternatively, students may count 12 credits of graduate-level work in any other university department toward their JD. With the Law School located at the center of the university, it is easy for students to take advantage of these options, and more than one-fifth of our second- and third-year students typically do so. Our Problem-Solving Initiative uniquely capitalizes on this setting to offer classes with teams of faculty and students from across the University, tackling complex, multi-disciplinary problems: the child care crisis, tribal policing, cryptoassets, climate change, and more. This innovative offering allows our students unparalleled opportunities to collaborate with and learn from a variety of experts in developing potential solutions to demanding modern problems.

Particularly renowned for international scholarship, Michigan’s leadership in recognizing the centrality of the field to modern lawyering is evident from its broad and deep international, comparative, and foreign law curriculum. The Geneva Externship Program provides 20 students annually with a unique “in” to extremely competitive jobs in the public international field, while other programs, such as the South Africa Externship Program, the India Externship Program, the Program for Law and Development in Cambodia and Namibia, and our AIRE Centre internships provide students with advanced training in international areas of interest. We also offer nine study-abroad programs with institutions in Asia, Europe, and South America.

Michigan is committed to the union of theory and practice, and our clinical program, with more than 45 years of experience, is unquestionably one of the nation’s best. Michigan is one of only a handful of states to allow students to appear in court as early as their second year, which means that our students have more opportunities to represent clients selected from a rich pool of cases—often in smaller jurisdictions, where a faster timetable allows students to handle many cases from beginning to end. We are also one of only two law schools to offer an administrative law clinic that allows participation as early as the second semester of 1L year. Our 17 diverse offerings include litigation clinics, such as our general Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic that offers a variety of trial work from immigration and refugee law to employment discrimination, along with more specialized offerings in Child Advocacy, Child Welfare Appellate, Juvenile Justice, Criminal Appellate Practice, Federal Appellate Litigation, Human Trafficking, Veterans Affairs, and our groundbreaking non-DNA Innocence Clinic; transactional clinics such as Community Enterprise, Entrepreneurship, International Transactions, and Low Income Tax Payer; the interdisciplinary medicolegal Pediatric Advocacy Clinic; an Environmental Law Clinic run in cooperation with the National Wildlife Federation; a Civil Mediation Clinic; and the administrative Advocacy Clinic, which is specifically designed for 1Ls. Our newest offering is the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative, which provides the opportunity to work on developing civil rights matters throughout the state. This broad array allows us to guarantee interested students the ability to enroll in at least one clinic, and further means that the vast majority of students are given their first or second choice.