University of Pennsylvania Law School

The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (also known as Penn Carey Law, Penn Law) is the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Penn Carey Law offers the degrees of Juris Doctor (J.D.), Master of Laws (LL.M.), Master of Comparative Laws (LL.C.M.), Master in Law (M.L.), and Doctor of the Science of Law (S.J.D.).

The entering class typically consists of approximately 250 students. Penn Carey Law's 2020 weighted first-time bar passage rate was 98.5 percent. For the class of 2024, 49 percent of students were women, 40 percent identified as persons of color, and 12 percent of students enrolled with an advanced degree.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School traces its origins to a series of Lectures on Law delivered in 1790 through 1792 by James Wilson, one of only six signers of the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Wilson is credited with being one of the two primary authors (the other being James Madison) of the first draft of such constitution, due to his membership on the Committee of Detail established by the United States Constitutional Convention on July 24, 1787, to draft a text reflecting the agreements made by the Convention up to that point.

As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson gave these lectures on law to President George Washington and Vice President John Adams and the rest of George Washington's cabinet, including Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Wilson was one of the original five U.S. Supreme Court associate justices nominated by George Washington and confirmed by the U.S. Senate via unanimous voice vote on September 26, 1789. In 1792, Wilson was appointed as Penn's first full professor of law and remained a professor at Penn through the date of his death in 1798.

In 1817, the University of Pennsylvania trustees appointed Charles Willing Hare as the second professor of law. Hare taught for one year before becoming "afflicted with loss of reason."

The University of Pennsylvania began offering a full-time program in law in 1850, under the leadership of the third professor of law at the Law Department of the University of Pennsylvania, George Sharswood. Sharswood was also named Dean of Penn's Law School in 1852 and served through 1867, and was later appointed as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (1879–1882).

In 1852, the University of Pennsylvania was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal. Then called The American Law Register, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review is the nation's oldest law review and one of the most-cited law journals in the world.

In 1881, Carrie Burnham Kilgore became the first woman admitted to, and, in 1883, to graduate from, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and subsequently became first woman admitted to practice law in Pennsylvania.