University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley Law

The UC Berkeley School of Law is indisputably one the nation’s most respected centers of legal education. Students praise the breadth of the specialized courses in areas such as “intellectual property/technology law, environmental law, entertainment, and human rights” and say their time at Berkeley Law “hasn’t always been easy by any means” but they are “surrounded by the top academics in their fields of expertise [who] are not only great professors but great human beings.” One student notes, however, that Berkeley Law’s desire to “get profs with fancy accomplishments” doesn’t always translate to better courses: “I much prefer a better classroom environment and ease of learning over ‘prestige.’” Outside the classroom, “there are a lot of experiential learning opportunities (e.g. clinics, externships, and skills courses) and [if] a student has a genuine interest in doing focused research, he or she can often find faculty to work with on an independent project.” Berkeley Law has nearly a dozen journals and unlike at most law schools, all of them (except for the Law Review) are open membership and students are allowed to participate immediately. While “the school does provide tremendous opportunity for 1Ls to get involved through journals and other groups,” 1Ls don’t participate in “clinics” the way the term is traditionally used in a law school setting. Instead, 1Ls may take part in “Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects (SLPS) through which students do legal work under the direction of attorney (rather than professor) supervision.” Upperclassmen praise Berkeley Law’s “strong public-interest law community, excellent clinical offerings, and great access to [the] Bay Area legal market” but say that “often students must show initiative to take full advantage.”
Professors at Berkeley Law are, for the most part, “incredible” and “accommodating,” and “even the older professors—who tend to have more traditional styles—impart progressive views and attitudes about the law.” Other students say the school’s professors are “not great,” even “cold”; they say that while “professors are certainly brilliant, they are not good teachers.” While some students praise Berkeley Law’s pass/fail grading system for cutting down on law school’s inherent cutthroat attitude, others lament that “giving 60 percent of the class the same grade (P for ‘pass’) diminishes the incentive for people not to completely check out once they have a job. The grading system is not informative enough. The lowest score in the class gets the same grade as several above-average scores.” Students who describe their professors as “top-notch” say that the faculty “genuinely care[s] about their students and make time to help them with questions both related to the course and issues outside the scope of the class.” Classrooms at Berkeley Law are “awesome and newly renovated” and “after the renovation, [Boalt’s] exterior isn’t amazing, but it is pretty nice.” The resources at a school like Berkeley Law are, as expected, world-class, and the library has research librarians who “are passionate and proud of what they do and look forward to helping students and make themselves available.”
The administration, according to some, “is highly responsive and that might be largely due to the fact that students are incredibly involved in school policy decisions.” Others say, “The administration seems disorganized and not very communicative. I have no idea what to do most of the time.” Some students would like more administrative support when it came to career counseling, particularly “setting up field placements (i.e. externships, study abroad, and [the] UC-DC program). Right now, the process is largely left up to the students.”

Students are split on whether their fellow Berkeley attendees are “incredibly friendly” and “mutually supportive of each other” or if they are “highly competitive and egotistical,” with a “tendency to [err] on the side of [being] overly politically correct.” While there’s no doubt that the school leans left—its progressive values are not in doubt—some express concern that “students who are just average liberal to conservative often feel ridiculed for their ideologies.” Students live in various spots in the surrounding region, which “limits the social life,” making it so that “clubs and organizations are the backbone of student life. . . . Students are extremely active in clubs because that’s necessary to make friends.” Even with the rigors of law school, students find time to unwind, with “beer Olympics, organized cabin weekend trips to Tahoe, party buses to Napa, bar crawls in San Francisco, (also taco crawls in San Francisco, which are BOMB).” Students also underscore that “social justice is not a fringe thing” at Berkeley Law.