We’re committed to delivering effective, relevant training—doctrinally strong and pragmatically useful—that equips our students to apply new knowledge and skills immediately upon beginning their careers. We’re also committed to creating intellectual excitement, promoting wide engagement, and inspiring lifelong inquiry.

To those ends, we provide a holistic model of legal education. It emphasizes substantive knowledge and legal analysis while integrating crucial skills such as teamwork and communication. It also recognizes student wellbeing as a priority that deserves strategies and tactics of its own. And it weaves our longstanding commitment to social justice, broadly defined, throughout the rich fabric of a UC Hastings education.

The value of our holistic approach was underscored in 2019, when our first-time bar-passage rate rose dramatically—by 20 percentage points over the previous year—a far higher gain than achieved by any other law school in the state. Our graduates’ 2019 employment rate surged too—a strong sign that employers recognize the strength and relevance of the UC Hastings model.

We emphasize substantive knowledge and legal analysis while integrating crucial skills such as teamwork and communication.

Even as we develop new ways of promoting student success—including visionary curricula in law and technology, health, negotiation, business, and other fields—we continue building on such central strengths as our pioneering clinical education program. Consistently recognized as one of the best in the nation, it provides opportunities for students to represent clients, write and argue motions, mediate disputes, and develop other essential skills. With 16 clinics and four externship programs to choose from, students can experience practice areas as diverse as immigration and refugee rights, environmental law, technology, and community economic development. Besides building skills, our clinics offer students the chance to help people resolve tax problems, housing issues, and other concerns—a powerful expression of our public-service mission.

Internships and externships in the courts and in diverse businesses, government offices, and community organizations also offer real-world legal experience. With more than 200 students participating in such placements each year, UC Hastings is a strong partner in staffing the offices of public, private, and nonprofit enterprises that serve society and advance justice.

Our Moot Court program is another intensive learning forum, in which students analyze complex issues and argue high-stakes appellate cases under considerable pressure. Like their classmates on our Trial and Dispute Resolution teams, they rise to the challenge brilliantly, winning national trophies year after year.

At UC Hastings, we don’t see law school as the final chapter of our students’ education. We see it as the first chapter of their professional careers.