University of Virginia School of Law
The University of Virginia School of Law (Virginia Law) is the law school of the University of Virginia, a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia.
University of Virginia School of Law
1819
$831 million (2023)[1]
$13.6 billion (2023)[2]
Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
4th (tie) (2024)[3]
Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 as part of his UNESCO World Heritage "academical village", each class in the three-year J.D. programme contains approximately 300 students. The school also offers LL.M., and S.J.D. degrees in law and hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers.
Notable distinguished alumni include members of the U.S. Supreme Court, several of the Kennedy brothers, including Robert F. Kennedy, numerous members of both houses of U.S. Congress, and judges on federal courts throughout the United States. The school has over 20,000 alumni in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and 64 foreign countries.[4]
Cost of attendance[edit]
The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) for first-year law students at UVA Law for the 2024–2025 academic year is $105,334 for Virginia residents and $108,348 for nonresidents.[10] Law School Transparency has estimated that the debt-financed cost of attendance for three years, based on data from the 2019–2020 academic year, is $304,672 for residents; the estimated cost for non-residents is $314,961.[11]
Campus[edit]
UVA Law receives no funding from the state; instead, the school depends upon the generosity of private donors (bolstered by its over 50% alumni giving rate), its substantial endowment (US $ 555 million[12]), the 5th largest among all law schools, and student tuition payments. In 1995–1997, UVA Law used entirely donated funds to renovate and expand its buildings on the university's North Grounds to include the former facilities of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, which built a new campus several hundred yards away.
The Arthur J. Morris Law Library holds more than 820,000 volumes, including substantial collections of federal, state, and international documents, manuscripts, archives, and online research databases.[13]
Rankings[edit]
In 2020, UVA Law was ranked No. 1 in Best Classroom Experience, Best Professors, and Best Quality of Life according to The Princeton Review. In 2024, U.S. News & World Report ranked UVA Law as fourth in the nation. In the 2019 Above the Law rankings, which focuses on employment outcomes, UVA Law ranked first in the nation.[23] A study published in 2011 in the Journal of Legal Education ranked UVA Law fourth in the number of partners in the National Law Journal's top 100 firms.[24]