Columbia Law : Our Curriculum

At Columbia Law School, classrooms are the most important rooms on campus. Our students are training to become leaders for the world and the intellectual resources that abound in our classrooms simply cannot be matched anywhere else.

The breadth and depth of the curricular offerings at Columbia Law School are exceedingly vast and uniquely robust with respect to many of the most compelling areas of interest in legal scholarship. Like the practice of law at the highest level, our curriculum is global, interdisciplinary, and rigorously practical.

Some examples include:

Trial in American Life, in which students compare the transcripts of actual trials with newspaper accounts of the trial. The goal is to understand, and learn to manage, how a high-profile trial will be perceived in society at large, which helps students sharpen their advocacy skills.

Deals, in which students are given documents from an actual business transaction, such as a public merger or a venture-capital deal. The students identify the economic problems in the deal and the solutions the parties used to solve them. The following week, a guest lecturer - the lawyer who actually implemented the transaction - provides a window into the parties' deliberations.

Theory & Practice of Workplace Equity, in which students do field research, studying a company, a nonprofit group, or a governmental organization to understand the processes it uses to curtail discriminatory practices. The goal is to understand which processes work, or do not work, in a particular context, and why.

In planning a J.D. program, at least 83 academic points must be earned toward the completion of a degree. For more detailed information about the following aspects of the Columbia Law School curriculum, please click on the links below: