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Columbia University School of Law
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Columbia Law School, located in New York City, is one of the professional schools of Columbia University, a member of the Ivy League. David Schizer is the dean.
Columbia is and has historically been one of the country's most prestigious law schools. Columbia is currently ranked 4th by U.S. News & World Report and has long been considered one of the nation's "Top 5" law schools.[1] Columbia ties with Stanford Law for academic peer reputation according to the latest U.S. News survey.
Admission to Columbia Law is among the most highly selective in the U.S. with only 15.9% of applicants being accepted in 2008.[2]
Columbia Law School has produced a large number of distinguished alumni including two Presidents of the United States (Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D Roosevelt) and eight Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, including the first Chief Justice of the United States (John Jay). More current members of the Forbes 400 attended Columbia than any other law school.[3] For its teaching and scholarship, Columbia is lauded in international law and intellectual property — constitutional law, criminal law, legal philosophy and critical race theory, among others, are also particularly strong.[4] Columbia is also well known for corporate law where it has maintained a storied job placement rate at the nation's top law firms.[5]
History
The Gothic Revival Columbia Law School building on the Madison Avenue campus (circa 1860)
The teaching of law at Columbia reaches back to the 18th century. Graduates of the university's colonial predecessor, King's College, included such notable early American judicial figures as John Jay, who would later become the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court. Columbia College appointed its first professor of law, James Kent, in 1793, but the formal instruction of law was suspended for some time during the early decades of the 19th century.
A revival of interest resulted in the formal establishment of the law school in 1858. The first law school building was a Gothic Revival structure located on Columbia's Madison Avenue campus. Thereafter the college became Columbia University and moved north to the neighborhood of Morningside Heights.
In the 1920s and 30s, the law school soon became known for the development of the legal realism movement. Among the major realists affiliated with Columbia Law School were Karl Llewellyn, Felix S. Cohen and William O. Douglas.
In September 1988, Columbia Law School founded the first AIDS Law Clinic in the country, taught by Professor Deborah Greenberg and Mark Barnes.[6]
Columbia Law School today
Today, Columbia Law School is well regarded in a number of different areas, with notable scholars in the following legal disciplines:
Widely cited scholars in other specialties include Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (race and gender), Michael C. Dorf and Henry Monaghan (constitutional law), Marvin Chirelstein (tax law) Thomas Merrill (administrative law, Property Theory), Robert E. Scott (contract law), and Patricia J. Williams (race and gender). Columbia was also among the first schools to establish both comparative and international law centers, and is also a major center for the study of Chinese, Japanese and Korean law.
In 2006, Columbia Law School embarked on an ambitious campaign to increase the number of faculty by fifty percent without increasing the number of students.
Jerome L. Greene Hall, home of the law school and the Arthur W. Diamond Library. September 2004
Columbia Law School’s Arthur W. Diamond Library is the second largest law library in the United States, with over 1,000,000 volumes. The Columbia Law Review is the second most cited law journal in the country and is one of the four publishers of the Bluebook. Columbia Law School has also cultivated alliances and dual degree programs with overseas law schools, including King's College London (KCL), University College London (UCL) and London School of Economics (LSE) in London, England, the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) in Paris, France and with UBA Law School in Buenos Aires . Furthermore, Columbia Law School runs vigorous clinical programs that contribute to the community, including the nation's first technology-based clinic, called Lawyering in the Digital Age. This clinic is currently engaged in building a community resource to understand the collateral consequences of criminal charges.[2] In April 2006, Columbia announced that it was starting the nation's first clinic in sexuality and gender law.[3] In 2007, Columbia opened a new program in law and technology.
Columbia Law School’s main building, Jerome L. Greene Hall (or simply "the Law School"), was designed by Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz, architects of the United Nations Headquarters and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (which for many years served as the site of Columbia Law School's graduation ceremonies). It is located at the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue and West 116th Street. One of the building's defining features is its frontal sculpture, Bellerophon Taming Pegasus, designed by Jacques Lipchitz, widely reviled among Columbia students. In 1996, the Law School was extensively renovated, including the addition of a new entrance façade and lobby, as well as the expansion of existing space to include a café and lounges. Other Columbia Law School buildings include William and June Warren Hall, the Jerome Green Learning Annex (which Jerome Green's representatives politely declined to have renamed after the building of Jerome Green Hall) and William C. Warren Hall (or "Little Warren").
The student-run organization Unemployment Action Center has a chapter at Columbia Law School.
Distinguished Columbia Law School alumni
- See List of Columbia Law School alumni
Columbia Law School in popular culture
- Marvel Comics character Matthew Murdock, the alter ego of superhero Daredevil, and his roommate and eventual law partner, Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, attended Columbia Law School.
- On the television show Law & Order, Assistant District Attorney Jamie Ross studied law at Columbia.
- In Body Heat, Edmund Walker (played by Richard Crenna), the wealthy husband of the film's femme fatale, is a Columbia Law School graduate.
- In the film Old School, Dean Gordon Pritchard bribes the student body president by guaranteeing her admission to Columbia Law.
- On the television show How I Met Your Mother, the character Marshall is a Columbia Law student.
- On The West Wing (S7E1), Toby Ziegler is seen in a three-year flash-forward to be teaching at Columbia.
- On The West Wing (S5), Angela (the new head of legislative affairs at the White House) meets Leo in regards to the President's high popularity in polls during the time of his daughter's kidnapping. When Leo says that the President's temporary self-removal from office was a constitutional necessity, Angela comments on the negative political ramifications and tells Leo, "If you want a Constitutional debate, call the Dean of Columbia Law."
References
External links
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