Mission and Vision:

Our aim is to create an institutional environment that promotes intellectual and practical learning. Our student body and faculty reflect a wide variety of backgrounds and interests. Out of this diversity, we seek to create a scholarly community in which students and faculty discuss issues freely in a variety of settings, both formal and informal.

Our curriculum is designed to train students to become skilled and ethical lawyers capable of adapting their practice to a changing legal world. To accomplish this goal, we have looked to a liberal arts model in shaping the law school’s curriculum. Our courses emphasize individual responsibility for learning, while providing every student instruction in the substantive and analytical skills necessary for successful practice.

We provide grounding in the common law and statutory foundations of our legal system, but also explore emerging doctrine, employing in each context the traditional methods of legal analysis, enriched by the insights of related disciplines. To assure that our curriculum incorporates the most current scholarship, our faculty is actively engaged in research in their respective areas of expertise. In addition to courses in legal doctrine, we offer a wide range of instruction in the skills of modern practice.

Because we view writing as the most fundamental of these skills, we emphasize teaching of writing at every stage of legal training. In addition, we offer courses in oral advocacy, counseling, negotiation, and the many skills of pretrial and trial advocacy. Because of our location in a major legal center, we are able to draw on leading practitioners and judges as adjunct professors and as supervisors of externship programs.

We recognize the law school’s responsibility to the legal community and the larger society. Consequently, the law school and its faculty are involved in a variety of activities to improve the legal system, including research and advocacy in law reform projects, service on bar association committees, and teaching in continuing legal education programs.

All of these goals reflect the commitment of the law school and the founding institution to the belief that human beings are God’s creations, equally entitled to dignity and respect. In every setting, we seek to train lawyers of high intellectual and practical ability, who are committed to ethical practice; to assisting the disadvantaged; and to free and open discussion of issues of law, policy, and values.