Inside what makes CUNY Law the best law school for training social justice advocates.
This spring, preLaw and National Jurist magazines ranked CUNY Law the #2 law school for Social Justice and awarded the Law School an A on its Justice & Opportunity Honor Roll. The school also ranks first in the nation for graduates entering public interest law. These distinctions reflect something intentional: at CUNY Law, social justice is not a concentration or a co-curricular emphasis. It is the architecture of a CUNY Law education itself.
In the Social Justice Honor Roll feature, Professor Marbré Stahly-Butts described how that architecture is built.
What We Teach
“Every single class at CUNY Law is taught through a lens that examines social justice principles, while interrogating the structures of power at work.” That begins in the first semester, when students take Liberty, Equality, and Due Process—a constitutional law course grounded in the Second Founding and our country’s first real experiment with multiracial democracy —alongside Critical Race Theory, a required course emphasizing the ways the law traditionally constructs and legitimizes inequality. “These courses,” Professor Stahly-Butts explains, “teach the law through the lens of understanding that law can either be a tool of social change and of progress or the law can, and has for a long time, been a tool to legitimize and naturalize injustice.”
How We Teach
From our origins, CUNY Law has built a program focused on experiential learning that produces practice-ready lawyers. From the sequenced lawyering program, which includes simulation-based training where every exercise is grounded in a social justice context, to working in partnership with community members, clients, movements and frontline advocates, students gain deep experience. That foundation carries into our nationally ranked and award-winning clinical program, where every student works under faculty supervision on matters central to using the law in service of human needs.
Who Teaches Here
CUNY Law’s faculty are teachers, scholars, organizers, and advocates—often all at once. They have founded nonprofits and advocacy organizations, argued before the Supreme Court, spent decades defending people in criminal court, and built careers representing tenants and communities fighting displacement. Students learn from people who are not describing social justice lawyering from a distance but are practicing it. CUNY Law also has the most diverse faculty in the nation: people who have navigated the legal profession from many of the same positions as their students, and who bring that experience into the classroom.
Our Student Body
CUNY Law’s student body reflects communities historically excluded from the legal profession across racial, economic, educational, and experiential lines. Some students arrive as career professionals: paralegals, advocates, and city agency administrators who want to practice the law they have spent years working alongside. Others are caregivers, justice-impacted individuals, or members of communities that experience directly how law acts upon rights and access. Lived experience is part of what students contribute to one another’s education, and part of what students bring to their clients.
That student body is the product of deliberate institutional choices. CUNY Law has removed barriers others have left in place, including omitting criminal history questions from its admissions application. Our signature access initiative and national model now two decades running, Pipeline to Justice, combines LSAT preparation, professional skills development, and mentorship to reach students who might not otherwise have had a path in. As Dr. Joanne Hyppolite, Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management, says in preLaw’s feature on Access and Opportunity, “We give those students a second look; we give them a second chance; we give them a viable opportunity to be successful in this space.”