J.D. Graduation Requirements

First-Year Courses

New students enter only in the Autumn Quarter and must take the full-time load of required first-year courses. Because of the heavy course load, first-year students are strongly discouraged from attempting to work on even a part-time basis. The student's first-year requirements are as follows:

• Basic Legal Skills
• Civil Procedure
• Constitutional Law
• Contracts
• Criminal Law
• Property
• Torts

Second- and Third-Year Courses

To graduate, a student must complete the following requirements during their second and third years of law school:

• 90 more credit hours (assuming the completion of 45 credits during the first year), for a total of 135 credit hours (Credits taken as Satisfactory/Non-Satisfactory cannot be included)
• 6 more residence quarters of at least 12 credits per quarter, for a total of 9 residence quarters (including the first year)
• 60 hours of public service legal work
• Professional Responsibility course
• Advanced writing requirement

Course Limitations

Some of the courses are subject to certain limitations:

1. Only 15 credits in the aggregate may be earned by a student for non-law course work, only 15 credits in the aggregate may be earned for externships, and only 20 credits in the aggregate may be earned for externships and non-law course work combined.
2. Only 6 credits in the aggregate may be earned by a student for Law 600 C, D, E, and F (independent study, journal editing, moot court).
3. Only 12 credits in the aggregate may be earned in any calendar academic year for Law E500, Law 600, and seminars, no more than 8 of these credits may be supervised by one faculty member, and no more than 6 may be earned in any one quarter. A calendar academic year begins with Summer Quarter and ends with the following Spring Quarter.
4. Some courses in the Law School are offered on a Credit/No Credit basis. There is no maximum on non-graded course credits after the first year. However, it should be noted that membership in the Order of the Coif, the national honor society for lawyers (top 10 percent), is not available to persons who take more than 25 percent of their law school work on a non-graded basis.