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Law School Facts

The School

  • Law Department is established: 1893
  • Law School is established: 1908
  • Type of school: Private
  • Term division: Quarter
  • 2011-2012 Tuition: $47,460
  • Library: More than 500,000 books and millions of pages available to students and faculty online

Faculty and Classes

  • Student-faculty ratio: 7.5 to 1
  • Full-time faculty: 55
  • Senior lecturers: 3
  • Visiting faculty: 13
  • Affiliated faculty: 8
  • Professors (by courtesy): 7
  • Lecturers: 90
  • Endowed chairs: 39
  • Emeriti: 20
  • Typical size of first year small section course: 30 students
  • Percentage of classes with 20 students or fewer: 77%
  • Percentage of classes with 30 students or more: 18%
  • Among first top-tier law schools to have wireless classrooms
  • In addition to a clinic, the number of other classes a student will enroll in during a clinic quarter: 0

Student Activities

  • Number of student publications and law reviews: 10
  • Number of student organizations: 56
  • Percentage of students working on law reviews and journals: 70%
  • Total number of Skadden Fellows: 54
  • Number of U.S. Supreme Court cases that Stanford law students have worked on since spring 2004: 121

Degrees and Admissions

Class of 2011 Degrees Awarded

  • 193 Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD)
  • 51 Master of Laws (LLM) - 20 concentrating in the area of corporate governance and practice, 20 in the area of law, science and technology and 11 in the area of international economic law, business and policy
  • 12 Master of the Science of Law (JSM)
  • 4 Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD)
  • 2 Master of Legal Studies

  • Number of applications Stanford Law typically receives every year, from all 50 states, Puerto Rico and 71 countries: 4,000
  • Entering admits: Fall only
  • JD Application deadline: February 1
  • JD Application fee: $100
  • Financial Aid deadline: March 15
  • Number of formal joint degree programs: 23
  • Number of customized joint degrees that students can propose: virtually limitless
  • Percent of student body receiving tuition fellowship or loan assistance: 80%
  • Average fellowship portion per recipient: $25,000
  • Percentage of Students who are Guaranteed Housing in their First Year: 100%

Class of 2013 statistics (admitted in 2010)

  • Number of students in class entering Fall 2010: 180 students
  • Women: 74
  • Men: 106
  • Percentage of Fall 2010 JD population who were students of color: 34%
  • Average age: 25
  • GPA range: 3.20-4.23
  • LSAT range: 160-180
  • Students with an advanced degree: 34%
  • Percentage of students who come to law school


    • Directly from college: 24%
    • 1-2 years after college: 42%
    • 3 or more years after college: 34%

Student Body Profile

As reported in the 2010 ABA, LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools

  Men Women
  # % # %
African-American 21 7.3 30 12
American Indian 6 2.1 7 2.8
Asian-American 35 12.2 38 15.1
Mexican-American 23 8 21 8.4
Puerto Rican 2 0.7 4 1.6
Hispanic 1 0.3 1 0.4
TOTAL MINORITIES 88 30.6 101 40.2
Foreign National 2 0.7 6 2.4
Caucasian 171 59.4 130 51.8
Unknown 27 9.4 14 5.6
TOTAL 288 53.4 251 46.6

Graduates

  • The median starting salary for a Stanford Law graduate in the class of 2010 (private sector): $160,000
  • Percentage of Stanford Law graduates who take jobs outside California at graduation: 62%
  • Percentage of graduates in the Class of 2010 who were placed in jobs within 9 months of graduation or are pursuing an advanced degree: 99%
  • Number of consecutive years Stanford Law graduates have clerked for justices on the U.S. Supreme Court: 38
  • Number of law school alumni sitting on U.S. courts: 85
  • AM Law 100 firms employing Stanford alumni as attorneys: 95
  • AM Law 100 firms with Stanford alumni as partners: 90

Alumni

  • Alumni population: 11,539
  • Total alumni residing outside of the United States: 509
  • Locations where Stanford law graduates can be found: 59 countries, 50 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Marshall Islands, and Guam

Notable Stanford Law Alumni

  • Riley Bechtel: Bechtel Corp. CEO and Chairman
  • Josh Bolten: White House Chief of Staff
  • Brooksley Born: first woman named to the ABA's Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary
  • Peter Bouckaert: Human Rights Watch Emergencies Director
  • Warren Christopher: Former United States Secretary of State/li>
  • Robert Paul Cochran: Emmy-winning TV creator and writer of "24"
  • LaDoris H. Cordell: first African American female judge in Northern California and first African American Superior Court judge in Santa Clara County; Former Vice Provost and Special Counselor to the President for Campus Relations, Stanford University
  • Mary B. Cranston: first female chair of a large national firm (Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP)
  • David C. Drummond: Senior Vice President for Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer for Google, Inc
  • Sian Elias: first female chief justice of New Zealand
  • Louis P. Friedman: Managing Partner, Flexis Capital LLC
  • Mi-Hyung Kim: Managing Director and General Counsel of South Korea's tenth largest conglomerate, Kumho Asiana Group
  • Fred von Lohmann: Senior Copyright Counsel for Google, Inc.
  • Cheryl Mills: Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Deputy White House counsel for President Clinton; Former Senior Vice President and Counselor of Operations at New York University
  • William H. Neukom: Managing General Partner and Chief Executive Officer of the San Francisco Giants. Former Microsoft general counsel and partner, K & L Gates.
  • Ronald K. Noble: Secretary General of Interpol
  • Sandra Day O'Connor: first female appointed to U.S. Supreme Court
  • Penny Pritzker: Co-Founder and Chairman, Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt), and Chairman and CEO, Pritzker Realty Group, LLC, Chairman of the Board of TransUnion
  • William H. Rehnquist: Chief Justice of the United States (1986-2005)
  • Anthony Romero: Executive Director of ACLU
  • J. Alexander Thier: Assistant to the Administrator and Director, Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs, USAID
  • Phoebe L. Yang: Senior Advisor on Broadband Issues to the Federal Communications Commission Chairman; Former Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development, Discovery Communications, LLC

Stanford University Wellspring of Innovation

Stanford�s entrepreneurial spirit, the result of its California location and the legacy of Leland and Jane Stanford, has helped spawn more than 3,000 companies in high technology and other fields.

Frederick Terman, provost from 1955 to 1965, is called the �academic architect� of the high-technology region known as Silicon Valley. He is credited with creating the university-industry partnerships that led to the establishment of companies key to the high-technology revolution.

Terman encouraged entrepreneurship among his students, created opportunities in California for Stanford-educated engineers, established continuing education programs for engineers in local companies and helped found the university industrial park where companies such as Hewlett-Packard could take root. Terman created an entrepreneurial culture that, today, extends to every academic discipline.

Among the companies Stanford faculty and alumni have helped create are:

  • Atheros Communications
  • BEA Systems
  • Charles Schwab & Company
  • Cisco Systems
  • Cypress Semiconductor
  • DNAX Research Institute
  • Dolby Laboratories
  • eBay
  • E*Trade
  • Electronic Arts
  • Exponent
  • Gap
  • Google
  • Hewlett-Packard Company
  • IDEO
  • Intuit
  • Intuitive Surgical, Inc.
  • Kiva
  • Linked In
  • Logitech
  • Mathworks
  • McCaw Cellular Communications
  • MIPS Technologies
  • Nanosolar, Inc.
  • Netflix
  • Nike
  • NVIDIA
  • Odwalla
  • Orbitz
  • Rambus
  • Rational Software
  • Silicon Graphics
  • Solyndra, Inc.
  • Sun Microsystems
  • Sun Power Corp.
  • Taiwan Semiconductor
  • Tandem Computers
  • Tensilica
  • Tesla Motors
  • Trilogy
  • Varian Associates
  • VMware
  • Whole Earth Catalog
  • Windham Hill Records
  • Yahoo!
  • Zillow