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The Georgetown Law 1L experience is shaped by scale before anything else. There are 672 students in the first-year class, split across five full-time sections and an Evening Division, which makes it one of the largest 1L classes in the country. That size decides almost everything else about your year.
This page is built from Georgetown's own published materials and its 2025 ABA disclosure. Where a number appears, it's Georgetown's number, not an estimate.
Georgetown enrolled 672 first-year students. That breaks down into 594 full-time and 78 in the Evening Division.
For context on how selective that is: 13,924 people applied, 2,193 got an offer, and the acceptance rate came out at 15.75 percent. The LSAT band across the whole class runs 166 at the 25th percentile, 171 at the median and 173 at the 75th. GPA runs 3.75, 3.93 and 3.98.
Scale shows up in ordinary ways. Your section is large. The library gets full in late November and stays full. There are more people in your year alone than there are in the entire student body at some law schools.
It also cuts the other way, and this is the part applicants underrate. A class this big means more sections, more electives that actually run instead of getting cancelled for low enrollment, more student organizations with the numbers to do something real, twelve law journals instead of three, and an alumni network in Washington that is genuinely hard to match.
Full-time 1Ls are placed in one of five sections. Students in each section take their classes together, so your section becomes your default social world for the year whether you plan it that way or not.
Inside that, Georgetown runs small sections. In the fall, every student is also assigned to a smaller group for at least one required doctrinal course, and Legal Practice: Writing and Analysis is taught in a small class too.
The small section is where the year actually happens for most people. Georgetown says outright that study groups and friendships tend to form inside small sections, and that the faculty who teach them often become informal advisors. If you're worried about getting lost in a class of 672, this is the structural answer to that worry.
This is the thing that makes Georgetown's first year genuinely different from everywhere else, and most applicants don't know it exists until they're admitted.
Georgetown offers two first-year curricula. Four of the five full-time sections take Curriculum A, the traditional first-year everyone would recognize. One section, Section 3, takes Curriculum B.
Students in Curriculum A take Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law I: The Federal System, Contracts, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Legal Practice: Writing and Analysis, Property, Torts, and a first-year elective.
Two things there are worth noticing. Georgetown teaches Constitutional Criminal Procedure in the first year rather than the more common Criminal Law, and it gives 1Ls a three-credit spring elective, which most schools don't. That elective is drawn from two buckets: legislative and regulatory law, or international, comparative and transnational law.
Students in Curriculum B take Bargain, Exchange, and Liability; Democracy and Coercion; Government Processes; Foundations of American Legal Thought Seminar; Legal Practice: Writing and Analysis; Legal Process and Society; and Property in Time.
The names sound abstract, and that puts people off before they understand what's going on. Curriculum B teaches the same first-year law. Georgetown is explicit that students in it get all the essential instruction other 1Ls get, including the fundamentals of property, contract and tort, and that it covers what you need for upper-level courses and the bar.
What changes is the arrangement. Instead of teaching Contracts and Torts as separate walled-off courses, Curriculum B integrates them around the themes they share, and builds the whole year around where law actually comes from: history, philosophy, political theory and economics. Georgetown describes the courses as designed to talk to each other. Where Curriculum A students take a spring elective, Curriculum B students take a fall seminar in legal theory instead.
Two practical facts settle most of the questions people have about it. Both curricula carry the same number of credits and the same faculty-recommended grading curve, so neither is a softer path to a better GPA. And enrollment in Curriculum B runs by lottery when it's oversubscribed, so wanting it doesn't guarantee it.
That lottery produced something unusual. Because assignment is random when demand exceeds seats, Georgetown faculty were able to study Curriculum B as an effective randomized controlled trial and publish the results, in a paper titled "Does the 1L curriculum make a difference?" in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Very few law schools have run an experiment on their own first year. Georgetown did, and then published what it found.
Two structural things sit alongside the classes.
Week One Simulations is an optional one-credit course that runs for a week in early January. Georgetown faculty build scenarios meant to mirror what lawyers actually do, and students practice interviewing, client counseling, negotiation, document drafting, trial skills and presentation, with feedback built into the format. For most 1Ls it's the first time in the year that law feels like a job rather than a reading assignment.
1L 101 is a series of sessions run by faculty and administrators on the mechanics nobody teaches you in class: how to read and brief a case, how to synthesize a semester of material, and how to prepare for an exam. If you've heard that law school never tells you how to actually take the exam, Georgetown at least tries.
This is the single most common misconception, and it changes what your three years look like.
The Law Center is at 600 New Jersey Avenue NW, on Capitol Hill next to Union Station. The main university campus is a few miles northwest in the Georgetown neighborhood, and most law students go there rarely, if ever. The law school has its own campus, its own gym, its own library and its own housing.
The location is the point. You're within a short walk of the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the federal courts, and most of the agencies. That proximity is why term-time internships in government and policy work are normal here rather than exceptional, and it's a large part of why Georgetown places the way it does in Washington.
The tradeoff is real too. This is a working government district, not a college town. It's quiet on weekends in a way that surprises people who expected a campus atmosphere.
Georgetown Law has its own self-contained campus, which is rare for a law school inside a university. You are not sharing a library or a gym with undergraduates.
The E.B. Williams Library is the main library and the default study building, and it's where the Office of Journal Administration sits in Room 170. The Eric E. Hotung International Law Building at 550 1st Street NW holds The Local, the campus dining spot. There's a dedicated Sport and Fitness Center. The clock tower is the building you'll see in every photo of the place.
The practical effect of a contained campus is that your day compresses. Class, library, gym, lunch and, if you live in Gewirz, your bed, are all within a few minutes of each other. That's a real advantage in November and a real risk in terms of never leaving.
Georgetown runs one of the larger evening programs in the country, and 78 of the 672 first-years are in it.
The numbers differ from the full-time division in ways worth knowing. The evening LSAT band is 164 at the 25th, 169 at the median and 172 at the 75th, so it sits a few points below full-time. Tuition is charged per credit at $2,950 rather than as a flat annual figure. Grant awards run lower too, at $12,578, $22,500 and $30,000 across the quartiles.
Curriculum B is a full-time offering, so the choice of curriculum isn't part of the evening path. What the Evening Division buys you is the ability to keep working in Washington while you study, which in this city often means keeping a job that's directly relevant to what you want to practice.
Gewirz is the residence hall on the law campus, which is genuinely unusual. Most law schools in expensive cities don't house their students at all. Georgetown's Office of Residence Life describes it as the anchor of social and community life on campus, and it's built to give incoming students support through the transition.
The practical version: during reading period your commute is a staircase. Your building is full of people sitting the same exams on the same days, which is either exactly what you want in December or exactly what you don't. If you're moving to DC without knowing anyone, Gewirz solves the two hardest problems of first semester, housing and finding people, in one decision.
The neighborhoods that work are the ones you can walk or take one train to. NoMa, just north of campus, is the most common choice and the most new-build. Capitol Hill proper is quieter and more residential. H Street NE has the nightlife. Navy Yard is a short ride and popular with people who want newer buildings and the waterfront.
Budget honestly here, because Georgetown's own cost of attendance sets aside $33,905 a year for living expenses, and that number is not generous for this city.
You'll eat near school more than you expect, so this is worth knowing before you arrive rather than discovering in October.
On campus, The Local sits in the Eric E. Hotung International Law Building at 550 1st Street NW. It's the default for a fast lunch between classes.
Directly around campus, Z Burger is at 500 New Jersey Avenue NW, effectively across the street, and it's open until 2am every night, which matters more than it should during exams. Wiseguy Pizza at 300 Massachusetts Avenue NW does pizza by the slice, stays cheap, and runs until 4am on Friday and Saturday. Article One is in the hotel at 400 New Jersey Avenue NW and opens at 6:30am if you're the kind of person who studies before class.
For coffee, Ebenezers Coffeehouse at 201 F Street NE opens at 6am and has actual seating downstairs, which makes it a real study option rather than a takeout window. Blue Bottle sits inside Union Station at 50 Massachusetts Avenue NE and opens at 5:30am.
Union Station itself is the pressure valve. There's a food court on the lower level and more options upstairs, and it's a two-minute walk, so on the days you have twenty minutes between things it's the answer.
When someone visits, or when the semester ends and you want to spend money: L'Ardente at 200 Massachusetts Avenue NW is the neighborhood's big-night restaurant, known for a forty-layer lasagna. Love, Makoto is in the same building. Bistro du Jour is a few doors down at 20 Massachusetts Avenue NW, and Art and Soul at 415 New Jersey Avenue NW does the brunch your parents will want when they're in town.
A little further out, NoMa and Union Market have the places people actually go on weekends. Ted's Bulletin, maman, Simona Cafe. Fifteen minutes on foot, less on a bike.
First year has a rhythm, and knowing it in advance is most of what reduces the panic.
August. Orientation, section assignment, small section assignment. You meet the people you'll spend the year with before you understand what any of the classes are.
September and October. Cold calls, heavy reading, and your first Legal Practice writing assignment. This is the stretch where everyone privately suspects they're the only one who doesn't understand Civil Procedure. Everyone is thinking it.
November. Outlining starts in earnest and the library fills. The gap between people who have been reviewing all semester and people who have been only reading opens up here, quietly, before anyone has a grade.
December. Reading period, then exams. One exam per class, usually, and it decides the grade. There's no homework average to cushion it.
January. Week One Simulations for the students who requested a seat, then spring semester starts. Grades arrive at some point in here and reset everyone's sense of where they stand.
Spring. Curriculum A students take their first-year elective. Recruiting for 1L summer work is already moving, and it moves earlier than most people expect.
May. Exams again, and then the Write On Competition lands almost immediately after. It's the least restful week of the year and it's the one that decides journal membership.
Worth knowing while you're choosing, because it shapes 2L and 3L. You need 85 credits total, and full-time students carry 10 to 16 a semester after first year.
Three requirements sit on top of the electives. There's an upperclass writing requirement, satisfied by a paper of 6,000 words or more excluding footnotes, done in an approved seminar or supervised research. There's a Professional Responsibility course. And students who matriculated in Fall 2016 or later need at least six credits of experiential coursework, which is where the clinics, externships and practicums come in.
That experiential requirement is the one to plan around early, because in Washington the externship options are unusually good and the best ones fill.
People ask whether Georgetown is cutthroat. That's the wrong frame. What matters is the structure the competition runs through, and there are three parts to it.
Georgetown applies a faculty-recommended grading curve to first-year courses, and it applies to Curriculum A and Curriculum B alike. A curve means your grade is partly a function of where your exam lands against everyone else's, not just how much you know. Everyone in the room got in with a median 171 LSAT, so the person you're being measured against is not a random law student.
The practical consequence is that effort alone doesn't separate people by December. Everyone works hard. What separates answers is exam technique, which is a learnable skill and mostly isn't taught in the doctrinal classroom.
Georgetown has twelve law journals: the Georgetown Law Journal, the American Criminal Law Review, the Georgetown Environmental Law Review, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, the Georgetown Journal of International Law, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives, the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, the Georgetown Law Technology Review, and the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. The Institute for Technology Law and Policy publishes an online journal on top of that.
Selection runs through the annual Write On Competition, administered by the Office of Journal Administration out of Room 170 in the E.B. Williams Library. It happens after 1L exams, when you are tired and would rather be anywhere else, and it's the moment first year quietly stops being about class.
Twelve journals is a lot, and that's good news. The odds of landing on a journal here are structurally better than at a school with three, and the range means you can aim at one that matches what you actually want to practice.
The other clock starts earlier than people expect. Firms open 1L applications well before the winter break in many cases, and the old December 1 date that gets repeated online was a NALP guideline that was rescinded in 2018. No ABA rule governs 1L recruiting timing. Plan around the actual employer calendars, not the folklore.
Georgetown's published cost of attendance is $117,481 a year. Of that, $33,905 is the living expense allowance, which is the figure most applicants skim past and then feel in February.
Evening Division tuition is charged per credit at $2,950. You need 85 credits to graduate.
Grant aid is real but partial. Georgetown reports 1,348 of 2,228 students receiving a grant, so roughly 61 percent. Among full-time students the grant runs $25,000 at the 25th percentile, $35,000 at the median and $47,500 at the 75th. Part-time awards run lower, at $12,578, $22,500 and $30,000. Forty-three students hold full-tuition awards and sixteen hold awards above full tuition.
One detail that matters when you're comparing offers: Georgetown does not use conditional scholarships. Your award doesn't depend on hitting a class rank, so a rough first semester can't cost you your money the way it can at schools that tie the two together. When you're weighing a bigger number from another school, check whether that number has a GPA condition attached, because a conditional award and an unconditional one are not the same offer.
The financial aid deadline is March 31.
Georgetown took in 120 transfer students and lost 1. That's the largest transfer class in the country, and it means roughly 120 people join your class for 2L who never sat through 1L with you.
Nearly half come from the DC market. American sent 29, which is about a quarter of the entire transfer class on its own. GW sent 11, Maryland 5, Howard 3, and Catholic, UDC and George Mason sent 1 each.
This is worth knowing in both directions. If you're a 1L here, your second year has a wave of new classmates who arrived on the strength of their first-year grades. If you're at another DC school reading this, the pathway is real and well travelled, and Georgetown takes more transfers than anyone.
WhatGeorgetown's numberFirst-year class672 total, 594 full-time and 78 eveningFull-time sections5, of which 4 are Curriculum A and 1 is Curriculum BFirst-year credits30Applications and offers13,924 applications, 2,193 offers, 15.75% acceptance rateLSAT 25th / 50th / 75th166 / 171 / 173 (full-time 167 / 171 / 173, evening 164 / 169 / 172)GPA 25th / 50th / 75th3.75 / 3.93 / 3.98Cost of attendance$117,481, including a $33,905 living allowanceStudents receiving grants1,348 of 2,228, about 61%Full-time grant 25th / 50th / 75th$25,000 / $35,000 / $47,500Conditional scholarshipsNoneFinancial aid deadlineMarch 31Credits to graduate85Law journals12, selection through the annual Write On CompetitionTransfers in / out120 in, 1 out
It fits you if you want Washington. Not in an abstract way, but specifically: if you want to intern at an agency during the semester, walk to the federal courthouse, and graduate into a city where the alumni network is dense. The location does work for you every single week.
It fits you if you want optionality. Twelve journals, a huge elective catalogue, a first-year elective most schools don't offer, and a class large enough that whatever niche you care about probably already has people in it.
It fits you if Curriculum B sounds interesting rather than intimidating. Almost no other law school will let you choose how your first year is arranged.
It fits you less well if you want a small cohort where everyone knows your name by October. Georgetown builds small sections precisely because the class is big, and they work, but 672 is still 672.
It fits you less well if you want a traditional campus town. This is Capitol Hill. It's professional, it's quiet on Sundays, and it's expensive.
Georgetown's first year is large, it's on Capitol Hill rather than in Georgetown, and it offers a choice of curriculum almost nobody else does. The money is heavy, the grant aid is real but reaches about six in ten students, and the scholarships come without conditions attached.
The competition is structural rather than personal. A curve, a Write On after exams, and a recruiting calendar that starts before you feel ready. None of that is unique to Georgetown. What's unique is the scale, the location and Section 3.
Ali Unar, Georgetown Law, Founder of Lovare Institut
July 30, 2026
July 30, 2026