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Suffolk University Law School is a private law school in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The fourth oldest law school in New England in continuous existence (after Harvard, Yale, and Boston University), Suffolk was founded in 1906 by Gleason Archer, Sr. to provide a legal education for those who traditionally lacked the opportunity to study law because of socio-economic or racial discrimination.

The law school currently has both day and evening (part-time) divisions. The school is located in the newly built Sargent Hall on Tremont Street in downtown Boston. There are over 200 upper level electives offered at the law school, and the school is consistently ranked one of the most technologically advanced schools in the nation. ²³ Admission to Suffolk is quite competitive. In 2005, 43% of applicants were admitted to the law school.² Suffolk regularly publishes five law reviews, to which students, faculty, and other scholars contribute. The school is featured annually in the Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report rankings. Suffolk has attracted notable scholars and prominent speakers ranging from John F. Kennedy to William Rehnquist to Antonin Scalia to Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Suffolk University alumni are found in high level judicial, political, and private positions throughout the United States. With over 25,000 alumni, Suffolk is the fourth largest law school in the United States, and only Harvard and Georgetown have a larger enrollment amongst eastern law schools.⁴

History

One of the oldest law schools in New England, Suffolk was founded in 1906 by lawyer Gleason Leonard Archer as the "Suffolk School of Law." The school was named after its location in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. Archer's goal was to provide immigrants, minorities, and the working class with the opportunity to study law. In 1907, Archer moved the school from Roxbury to downtown Boston. His first student passed the bar in 1908. By 1930, Archer developed Suffolk into one of the largest law schools in the country, and the law school received full accredition from the ABA.⁵ Originally an all-male school with New England School of Law serving as a "sister" school, Suffolk became co-educational in 1937.⁶ In 1999 Suffolk Law School opened its new building on 120 Tremont Street across from Boston Common.

Curriculum

Suffolk Law School has a 3-year day program and a 4-year evening program offering a broad selection of courses. The law school maintains a traditional first-year juris doctor curriculum which includes the year-long courses of Civil Procedure, Contracts, Property, Torts, and Legal Writing, in addition to the semester-long Constitutional Law and Criminal Law courses. A course in Professional Responsibility is required, and each student must also fulfill legal writing and legal skills requirements prior to graduation. Until 2008 Fiduciary Relations, a class concentrating on the law of Agency and Trusts, was required. Upon completion of the required curriculum, students at Suffolk choose from over 200 upper-level courses, many of which focus on learning practical skills, including several legal clinics.⁷ Students may also receive credit for diverse internships and clerkships, including those at various courts in the Boston area. Academic concentrations are available in Civil Litigation, Financial Services, Health/Biomedical, and Intellectual Property.⁸

Suffolk Law also offers a program abroad: the Semester in Sweden Program with Lund University, a university where Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg conducted research for her book on Swedish Law in the 1960s.¹⁰

The average faculty to student ratio at Suffolk is 16.5 students per faculty member.¹¹

Academic rankings

Suffolk is ranked annually in the U.S. News and Princeton Review lists of top law schools in the United States. Suffolk had a bar passage rate of 94.3% in 2008.¹² In 2008 U.S. News ranked Suffolk 20th in the United States for its legal clinics, tied with UCLA Law and the University of Chicago Law School, and Suffolk's Legal Writing program was ranked 33rd, tied with Georgetown Law.⁷ The school was ranked in the top third tier overall.¹³ The 2007 edition of Judging the Law Schools ranked Suffolk #38 overall in the United States behind the University of Chicago based upon ABA data.¹⁴ In the 2004 edition of The Best 117 Law Schools, Princeton Review ranked Suffolk 5th in the United States in "most competitive students."¹⁵ In 2008 National Jurist ranked Suffolk in the top sixty law schools in the country for public interest law.¹⁶

Admissions

In 2005 the median GPA for incoming Suffolk Law students was 3.35, and the median LSAT score was 157.² The admission rate for 2005 was 43%.² A breakdown of the various degree programs reveals that for certain programs the selectivity can dramatically increase,such as the LL.M. program.¹⁷

Libraries

In 1999, after construction on a new law school building was completed, the John Joseph Moakley Library moved to its new home in Sargent Hall. The library contains over 375,000 volumes covering common law and statutes from all major areas of American law in each of the 50 states and with primary legal materials from the U.S. federal government, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the European Union. The library also features a substantial treatise and periodical collection and houses the John Joseph Moakley Archive (a collection of the late U.S. Representative's papers which he gifted to the school in 2001).¹⁸ Suffolk also records and broadcasts oral arguments for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and has archives of those proceedings available in the library and online.¹⁹

Law Review publications

Suffolk University Law School maintains five student-run publications. The Suffolk University Law Review, founded in 1967, is the oldest continuously published scholarly publication at the law school.²⁰ The Moot Court Honor Board, which runs many of the school's successful mock trial competitions, produces the Suffolk Journal of Trial & Appellate Advocacy, which publishes scholarly work written by leading academics, judges, practitioners, and students covering varied trial and appellate practice issues in the United States. Suffolk's Journal of High Technology Law focuses on providing research articles on issues of copyright, trademark and patent law. The Suffolk Transnational Law Review, founded in 1976, is one of approximately 30 law reviews in the United States that focus on international legal issues and the second oldest in existence (after the Harvard International Law Journal). Suffolk recently recognized a fifth journal, the Journal of Health and Biomedical Law, which focuses on cutting-edge legal developments in the field of health law.²¹ In addition to the journals, Suffolk publishes Dicta, the law school student newspaper since 1972.²²

Suffolk Law School in literature, film and culture