Yale Law School (often referred to as Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, located in New Haven, Connecticut,United States. The school’s small size and prestige makes its admissions process the most selective of any law school in the United States. Established in 1824, Yale Law offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D., M.S.L., and Ph.D. degrees in law. Yale Law has been ranked the number one law school in the country by U.S. News and World Report every year since the magazine began publishing law school rankings.

Yale Law has produced a large number of luminaries in law and politics, including United States Presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton. The law school’s Lillian Goldman Law Library has been memorialized as the meeting place of Bill Clinton and fellow studentHillary Clinton, the 67th Secretary of State. Former President William Howard Taft was a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School from 1913 until he resigned to become Chief Justice of the United States in 1921. Alumni also include current United StatesSupreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor, as well as a number of former Justices, includingAbe Fortas, Potter Stewart and Byron White; several heads of state around the world, including Karl Carstens, the fifth President ofGermany, and Jose P. Laurel, the president of the Republic of the Philippines; and the current deans of six of the ten top-ranked law schools in the United States: Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Virginia, and Penn.

Each class in Yale Law’s three-year J.D. program enrolls approximately 200 students. The school’s law library, the Lillian Goldman Law Library, is one of the largest law libraries in the world. Yale’s flagship law review is the Yale Law Journal.