Along the walkway to Case Western Reserve University School of Law, a banner reads, “A national leader in experiential education.” Confirming that status, the Spring 2020 issue of Prelaw magazine, a publication of National Jurist, has ranked CWRU Law School ninth in the nation in Practical Training, up from 12 in 2019.
Experiential education is woven into the fabric of CWRU Law School’s curriculum, which is designed to give students hands-on experience at a level matched by very few other schools. It's a model we borrowed from the CWRU's world-class Medical School. We keep our entering class sizes small, usually between 130 to 150 students, to be able to provide this type of intensive real-world training to every student.
Practical training is the key component that makes our students ready to excel after graduation, so we start early with the “1L Client Experience.”
We fund summer externships across the country and around the globe after the first year to provide our students vital real-world experience in a variety of specialty areas. In our labs and practicums, second-year students work on immigration, human rights, death penalty, human trafficking, environmental and health care cases under the guidance of our expert faculty. As they progress further in their education, the opportunities for our students continue to grow, culminating with a capstone in their third year, where every student works in a full-time, semester-long clinic or externship either locally, nationally or abroad.
We have nine clinics and hundreds of dedicated and preferred externship placements from which our students may choose to work. We also have nine Moot Court and Mock Trial teams, which annually are among the best in the nation and the world. And when they graduate, our students have attained the skills through extensive practical experience inside and outside the classroom to succeed in any field of law.