Law School

Boston College Law School

Since our founding in 1929, Boston College Law School has earned an international reputation for educational excellence and the highest standards of professionalism.  The school is among the top few law schools in the U.S. in the number of applications it receives, and has an overall applicant-to-acceptance ratio that is among the most selective in the nation.

Our faculty includes authors of casebooks--in tax, environmental law, and civil procedure, to name a few--and other major academic books.  Authors of articles too numerous to count, published in the country's leading law reviews.  A former President of the International Society of Family Law.  A Special Advisor to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  Twelve members of the American Law Institute, the U.S.'s premier law reform organization.  Advisors to governments and NGOs around the world.  As importantly, though, our faculty are extraordinary teachers as well as scholars.  Indeed, their primary mission is to mentor and teach our students, and they do it well.

Is Boston College the right school for you? Only you can answer that question, but here's what we think is special about our school. It is not simply our faculty, as wonderful as they are. Nor is it simply our students, who are among the most talented in the world.  Nor is it the great Jesuit university of which we are a part.  Nor is it our beautiful campus, or our close proximity to Boston -- New England's most cosmopolitan city.

Rather, it is our ethos. While we offer a world-class legal education, we put special emphasis on the ideals of social justice and public service. This approach makes for students who are at once highly credentialed and highly collegial in their relationships with each other and with the faculty. It also makes for a strong sense of community – a sense that springs from a shared respect for law as the cornerstone of a democratic society, and a shared respect for one another as students, scholars and practitioners of the law.

The LL.M. Program

The Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree program is designed to immerse participants in the intricacies and flavor of the United States legal system, and help prepare them for the challenges of work in an increasingly global legal community.  In this sense, it is directed primarily to lawyers and law graduates trained outside of the U.S.  However, we also welcome applications from U.S.-trained lawyers who may uniquely benefit from advanced work here.

The program's possibilities are as diverse as the students we hope to attract. LL.M. students may choose from among most of the courses in the Law School's extensive curriculum, including both introductory and advanced courses. The range of options is enormous – from business law to human rights to international law and beyond. The program is a "general" one, in that we do not channel students into particular subject area tracks. However, the curriculum affords students ample opportunity to specialize in their fields of interest.

Students are required to complete at least 24 credits of work in residence during a single academic year. This includes a core course, "The United States Legal System", which is required of all foreign-trained candidates. Students also must produce a piece of writing of a breadth and magnitude commensurate with the school's upper-level writing requirement for J.D. students. This can be completed in one of the school's regular seminars, or written independently under faculty supervision. LL.M. students also are encouraged to take a "Legal Research and Writing" course designed specially for them. Otherwise, students study alongside their J.D. classmates – a true immersion experience in American legal education.

Entry requirements

Admission to the LL.M. program is highly selective.  We are most interested in applicants who have completed their prior legal studies with high rank and who intend to return to their home countries to contribute to the legal profession.  Otherwise, we are ecumenical:  we are equally interested in applicants pursuing careers in private practice, government service, the judiciary, international organizations, non-governmental organizations and legal scholarship. 

At a minimum, applicants must have either  

• graduated from a U.S. law school that is approved by the American Bar Association,
• obtained a full degree in law from a