Each year Stanford Law receives more than 4,500 applications from potential students; each year approximately 180 join our community. Students come from across the United States and around the globe—from diverse careers in the public and private sector, small liberal arts colleges and institutes of technology, military academies and academies of art, theological seminaries and medical schools, distinguished state universities, and centuries-old private universities.

In selecting students for the JD program, two criteria dominate the decision-making process: the individual applicant’s intellectual ability and aptitude, and the overall diversity of the class admitted. The first criterion, aptitude, properly recognizes that the lawyer’s work calls particularly for the exercise of analytic and other intellectual abilities—facility with words, concepts and perceptions of personal relationships. The second criterion, diversity, contemplates that diversity will improve the quality of education at the law school by enabling the exchange of differing views in and out of class, and will improve the school’s training of lawyers who take the lead in representing diverse groups and interests in a wide variety of contexts, in the private and public sectors.