A Balanced Approach

Among the nation’s leading law schools, Vanderbilt Law School stands out as a forward-thinking community of professionals committed to providing tomorrow’s lawyers with the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to tackle difficult problems locally, nationally, and globally in law, public service, business, government, or other areas where law and legal reasoning promote positive outcomes for individuals and society. Scholarship, professional development, and commitment to service for the greater good are integral components of a Vanderbilt legal education.

With about 155 students in each entering JD class, our smaller size allows greater access to an elite faculty in an unusually collegial and rigorous school culture. Drawn from across the nation and abroad, VLS students have remarkably varied backgrounds, experiences, and professional goals, while sharing a common commitment to challenge themselves and each other to excel.

With state-of-the-art facilities situated on a beautiful and vibrant university campus in a sophisticated and livable city, Vanderbilt offers a balanced approach to a productive and rewarding legal education.

Accessible Faculty, Collegial Culture

The central experience of a Vanderbilt legal education is working closely with our faculty of leading experts who approach teaching with the same careful preparation, skill, and enthusiasm they seek to foster in students embarking on professional careers. Lawyers must be team players in difficult circumstances, and Vanderbilt’s well-established active-learning culture promotes collegiality, collaboration, mutual support, and respect for others’ views as integral components of professional practice. Widely respected for their scholarly impact, professors draw on their cutting-edge scholarship to create engaging classroom courses connected to experiential learning opportunities that strengthen core and content legal expertise. Faculty members take an open-door approach, extending their availability to students well beyond class times.

An outstanding classroom curriculum reinforced by experiential and interdisciplinary approaches to advanced training in the second and third years are the hallmarks of a Vanderbilt legal education. Entering students begin their studies with Life of the Law, a course designed to distill the core ideas of legal education and provide tools and information that help beginning law students become productive and effective as quickly as possible. First-year sections of 55 to 60 students study torts, contracts, criminal law, civil procedure, property, and the regulatory state. Legal writing and a spring semester elective course round out the first-year curriculum.