STUDY

LEARN IN A WORLD-CLASS UNIVERSITY

When you enroll at Duke Law, you become part of one of the world’s leading research universities, known for its commitment to collaboration on campus and innovative interdisciplinary programs. Duke has more graduate students than undergraduates, and the Law School is steps away from Duke’s prestigious schools of business, public policy, engineering, and medicine, enabling you to take cross-listed courses, attend lectures and panel discussions, and engage in extracurricular academic, professional, and social activities.

Programs like BASS CONNECTIONS offer the opportunity to learn alongside your future colleagues — or clients — from other academic disciplines and collaborate on immersive research projects, many for academic credit. Students’ work has resulted in policy recommendations, journal articles, datasets to inform future research, and more. They have collaborated with policymakers on Medicaid reform, developed cybersecurity guidelines to protect personal data, and produced a documentary film on peacemaking in post-conflict zones.

Additionally, a number of Duke Law students take their commitment to interdisciplinary work further by signing up for a DUAL DEGREE, pursuing two world-class degrees at once and preparing for a career at the intersection of law and another discipline. Many choose one of the Law School’s signature programs: the JD/LLM in International and Comparative Law, JD/LLM in Law and Entrepreneurship, and the JD/MA in Bioethics and Science Policy.

“When I was applying to law schools, I always knew that I wanted to end up somewhere with a tight-knit, collaborative, and engaged community. I eventually decided to attend Duke Law because it offered exactly that, with opportunities to work closely with faculty and students outside the classroom to effect change in the wider world.”

MATTHEW PHILLIPS ’20 was part of a Bass Connections team led by Duke Law faculty members that studied how cyberattacks and data breaches harm consumers. He collaborated with graduate students from Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.

Through Duke’s MARGOLIS CENTER FOR HEALTH POLICY, Bennett Wright ’20 worked with Duke Law Professor Arti Rai, an internationally recognized expert in innovation policy and intellectual property, administrative, and health law, to craft and implement research into trade secrecy and accountability in artificial intelligence-enabled health care. Along with Rai, he also looked at how recent Supreme Court decisions might be affecting investment in the biotech sphere. And he collaborated with other Margolis scholars in research both on new privacy regulations pertaining to health care and new U.S. Food and Drug Administration rules.

“Those are regulations that the businesses I plan to help in my career are going to encounter,” said Wright, who is now clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears appeals of patent cases. “These projects have been very helpful to me in terms of getting a deeper understanding of the field.”