Stanford Law School, one of the nation’s premier institutions for legal scholarship and education, will now offer joint formal degree programs for students pursuing legal studies. 

The law school collaborated with 13 other Stanford graduate departments and schools to design this unique program.  This multidisciplinary education program aims to aid J.D. students by considerably reducing the cost and time of undertaking legal studies while concurrently pursuing a master’s or Ph.D degree.  This will also prepare students to face the legal profession’s emergent demands and new challenges. 

With the rising needs of its clientele, lawyers today work in “cross-disciplinary/cross-professional teams.”  They have ventured into technical industries such as the environmental, engineering, and medicinal fields.  This move necessitates the widening of the traditional law school curriculum, so that they embrace an all comprehensive global perspective.  The law school’s new formal programs thus have been made more liberal than its existing “generic” joint degree programs.  It now allows students to pursue a joint degree with almost any Stanford graduate department or outside school.

Because the joint degree programs allow cross credits, they reduce time and tuition by almost a year.  Altogether, there are 13 disciplines for formal joint degrees in conjunction with Stanford graduate programs.  The school will add more formal joint degree programs in the near future.

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer says the programs are aimed to develop students’ “broad intellectual capital” and to allow them to “practice law in the world today.”  In addition to teaching law students to “think like a lawyer,” the school wants students to acquire other “valuable skills and analytical abilities” that are “transferable to other serendipitous opportunities,” Kramer added.

“The programs […] and the wide latitude given to students are designed to give our students a great deal of flexibility,” said Prof. Jeff Strnad who supervises the law school’s joint degree programs.  Strnad also holds a courtesy appointment as Professor of Economics with the Stanford University Department of Economics.