Creighton's School of Law traces its mission to an unusual origin: it was founded in 1904 as a joint project between Creighton University and the Omaha Bar Association, with Timothy J. Mahoney serving as its first dean. That civic-professional partnership set an early tone, and the school has stayed rooted in Omaha ever since — first in the Edward Creighton Institute downtown until 1921, then on the main Creighton campus, and today in the Ahmanson Law Center at 2133 Cass Street. The ABA accredited the program in 1924, and the school has been led since 2019 by its eleventh dean, Joshua P. Fershee, following deans Marianne Culhane (2010–2015) and Paul E. McGreal (2015–2017).
The Jesuit, Catholic identity shows up less as theology in the curriculum and more as an institutional commitment the school describes as 'educating the whole person' — a framework that shapes advising, mentoring, and community life rather than doctrine in the classroom. In practice, that translates into a 9:1 student-faculty ratio and small class sizes, with most upper-level courses enrolling fewer than 25 students, plus a formal mentoring program that pairs every incoming student with a 2L. For applicants weighing a large, anonymous 1L section against a smaller cohort where faculty and classmates know your name, Creighton's structure is built around the latter.
The mission also shows up in service-oriented programming. The school launched a poverty law program in 2017, and its live-client clinics — the Milton R. Abrahams Clinic, the Creighton Immigrant and Refugee Clinic, a Bankruptcy Clinic, the Juvenile Justice Legal Clinic, and an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Legal Clinic — put students into direct legal work for underserved clients well before graduation. Students can also extend that experiential focus abroad through a Spain exchange, a Dominican Republic immersion trip, and the Nuremberg Summer Program.
Creighton has also built real ties between its classroom and the working judiciary. The Nebraska Supreme Court holds an annual session at the law school, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit heard oral arguments there in November 2019 — giving students a chance to watch appellate advocacy happen a few steps from their lockers rather than read about it in a casebook. On the faculty side, Professor Emeritus G. Michael Fenner co-taught the constitutional law course with Justice Clarence Thomas until the arrangement last ran in February 2019, a distinctive credential among the school's roughly three-dozen listed faculty, which also includes endowed chairs like Patrick Borchers (Lillis Family Professorship) and R. Collin Mangrum (Yossem Chair in Legal Ethics). Research and skills training are further organized through the Werner Institute and the Kaiman Center, and students can publish or write on either the Creighton Law Review or the Creighton International and Comparative Law Journal.
One institutional choice is worth flagging for anyone comparison-shopping by rankings: Dean Fershee has stated that Creighton does not participate in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. That means the school is asking applicants to evaluate it on its own stated terms — mission, mentoring structure, clinical access, and Omaha placement — rather than on a rankings number it has opted out of supplying.
A 153 LSAT sits exactly at Creighton's reported median, and an acceptance rate around 64.5% reflects where Creighton's overall applicant pool stands relative to the school's published LSAT and GPA medians, rather than indicating any individual applicant's chances. In the most recent reporting cycle, Creighton received 815 applications, extended 526 offers, and enrolled a class of 162 students, all full-time.
The school's 25th–50th–75th percentile LSAT bands are 150–153–156, and GPA bands run 3.14–3.51–3.74. Use these as planning anchors rather than predictions: a 150 LSAT places an applicant at Creighton's 25th percentile, meaning a quarter of the enrolled class scored at or below that mark; a 156 places them at the 75th percentile, among the stronger LSAT scores in the room. The same logic applies to GPA — a 3.74 is comfortably in the school's upper quartile, while a 3.14 sits at the lower end of the enrolled range. Applicants below the 25th percentile on either metric aren't excluded from the pool, but they're outside where most of their eventual classmates will land.
Creighton also offers three admissions entry points worth building a timeline around: an Early Action deadline of November 1, a Priority Scholarship deadline of February 1, and a Final Application deadline of June 1 for the fall term. The gap between those first two dates is worth building into your timeline, since the Priority Scholarship deadline falls well before the Final Application deadline.
Money follows numbers closely at Creighton. Roughly 89% of students receive some grant aid, and the median grant among full-time recipients is $25,600. But that aid is not evenly distributed: about 45% of students receive a grant covering less than half of tuition, 28% receive one covering half to full tuition, and 13% receive a grant covering full tuition.
Creighton's most recently reported first-time bar passage rate is 71.17%, against a Nebraska statewide average of 79.36% for the same cycle — a gap of roughly eight points that any applicant weighing this school should look at directly rather than skip past. Extend the window to two years, however, and the picture narrows: Creighton's ultimate pass rate climbs to 77.78%, meaning most graduates who don't clear the bar on attempt one do pass on a retake, but the school still ends up below the state's single-attempt average even after that second chance.
A few data points in the pack help explain, without excusing, where that gap comes from. Creighton's entering-class LSAT band sits at 150 (25th), 153 (median), and 156 (75th percentile), with GPAs of 3.14/3.51/3.74. Those numbers put the school toward the more accessible end of the admissions spectrum — an acceptance rate of 64.54% on 815 applications for a class of 162 — which is exactly the kind of applicant profile where bar-passage risk tends to run higher nationally, since incoming LSAT and GPA are among the most consistently cited predictors of bar outcomes. That correlation is well established in the field generally; it is not something the Creighton data pack states as a cause, so read it as context, not as the school's own explanation.
What the pack does show Creighton doing about it: the school has a dedicated Assistant Dean of Academic Success and Bar Preparation (Maryl Sattler), a title that exists specifically to run bar-support programming, and a heavy experiential curriculum — 64 clinic seats with 47 filled, 55 field placements filled, and 462 simulation-course enrollments — that at least signals institutional investment in practice-ready skills alongside traditional bar subjects. Whether that infrastructure is closing the gap over time isn't something this single data cycle can tell you; a one-year snapshot can't show a trend.
For an applicant, the practical takeaway is to treat the 71.17%-vs-79.36% comparison as a real, current risk factor rather than noise, while also registering that the two-year 77.78% figure means the large majority of Creighton grads do eventually clear the bar. If you enroll with an LSAT/GPA profile near or below Creighton's median, it's reasonable to ask the admissions office directly what bar-prep resources and academic-support interventions are triggered for at-risk students, since the pack confirms the role exists but doesn't detail the curriculum of that support.
Most Creighton graduates stay in Nebraska and land at small or mid-sized firms, not at national Big Law shops. Of the 113 graduates in the reporting class, the school's own employment data lists Nebraska as the single largest employment jurisdiction, and the firm-size breakdown backs that up: 29 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 12 to firms of 26-50, 9 to firms of 51-100, and 8 to firms of 11-25 — meaning the great majority of employed graduates are at firms well under 100 lawyers. Zero graduates are recorded as solo practitioners.
Big Law is present but small in absolute terms: 6 graduates (5.3% of the class) went to firms of 501 or more attorneys, and 1 more landed at a firm in the 251-500 range. So roughly one in twenty Creighton grads enters the largest-firm tier that pays the six-figure "Big Law" salary bimodal peak — a real outcome, but a minority path here, not the center of gravity.
Government work is a meaningfully larger track than Big Law at Creighton: 15 graduates (13.3%) took government jobs, compared to 6 in public interest (5.3%) and 10 in business/industry roles. Clerkships add another 5 graduates — 2 federal and 3 state/local — which, combined with the government number, points to a real pipeline into Nebraska's courts and public-sector legal offices. That pipeline is reinforced by the school's notable-alumni list, which is heavy with Nebraska Supreme Court justices, U.S. District Court judges for the District of Nebraska, members of the Nebraska Legislature, and former U.S. Attorneys — a roster that reads less like a national Big Law feeder and more like the backbone of Nebraska's own bench and government bar.
Overall, 88.5% of graduates in the reporting class were employed in full-time, long-term jobs that either require bar passage or give a JD advantage — a solid outcome that should be read alongside where those jobs actually are. Creighton's location in Omaha, its status as the only law school in the city, and features like the Nebraska Supreme Court holding an annual session at the school and the Nebraska Senior Law Student Practice Rule (which lets certified students appear in court under attorney supervision before graduation) all point toward a school built to feed the regional Nebraska and Council Bluffs-area legal market rather than to compete nationally for large-firm placement. If your career goal is Big Law from day one, the data suggests you'd be one of a small handful each year rather than following a well-worn institutional track; if your goal is Nebraska courts, government, or a firm in the Omaha area, the numbers line up much more directly with what Creighton is actually producing.
At Creighton, a certified 3L can stand up in a Nebraska courtroom and represent a client under an attorney's supervision — a right created by the Nebraska Supreme Court's Senior Law Student Practice Rules (Neb. Ct. R. §§ 3-701–3-706). The law school's dean grants senior certification, and once certified, students can appear, file, and argue under the direct oversight of a licensed supervising attorney, rather than simply observing or drafting from the sidelines.
That courtroom authority sits on top of a fairly deep bench of experiential options. Creighton lists 64 available law clinic slots, of which 47 were filled in the reporting period, alongside 55 filled field placements and 462 filled simulation-course seats — the last figure signaling that simulation-based skills training (not just live-client work) reaches a large share of the student body, not a small self-selected cohort. The school also counts 19 co-curricular offerings that sit alongside the formal clinic and field-placement docket.
The named clinics span several practice areas rather than clustering in one niche:
Experiential learning across these programs is coordinated by a dedicated Director of Experiential Learning, Carol C. Knoepfler, and the Catherine Mahern Endowed Chair in Clinical Legal Education (held by Diane Uchimiya) signals that clinical teaching is an endowed, permanent part of the faculty rather than an adjunct add-on.
What this combination means practically: a Creighton student can move from simulation coursework, into a field placement inside a local office, into supervised courtroom appearances under senior practice certification, all before graduation — a sequence that gives Omaha-bound and Nebraska-bar-bound students court-facing experience that many peer schools reserve for post-bar practice. The pack does not report how many students complete each stage of that sequence in a given year, so applicants weighing how central hands-on work will be to their own three years should ask the admissions office directly how clinic and field-placement seats are allocated among the roughly 162-student entering class.
A Creighton constitutional law seminar had a co-teacher most law students never get: Justice Clarence Thomas, who partnered with longtime professor G. Michael Fenner to teach the course, with the last session held in February 2019. That arrangement is now part of Creighton's institutional history rather than a current offering, but it reflects a school small enough — and connected enough — to bring a sitting Supreme Court justice into a regular seminar rather than a one-off guest lecture. The school's other high-profile courtroom moments include the Nebraska Supreme Court holding an annual session at the law school itself, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit hearing live oral arguments there in November 2019.
Outside the constitutional law spotlight, Creighton's academic identity also includes the Werner Institute, directed by Rachel J. Goedken, which anchors joint-degree options including the JD/MS in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and the JD/MS in Government Organization and Leadership (GOAL). A second named center, the Kaiman Center, rounds out the school's institute-level offerings, though the pack does not detail its specific focus.
The faculty roster carries several endowed chairs that concentrate expertise in specific fields: Patrick Borchers holds the Lillis Family Professorship, Edward A. Morse holds the McGrath North Mullin and Kratz Endowed Chair in Business Law, Craig W. Dallon holds the Sal Carta Real Estate Law chair, R. Collin Mangrum holds the AA and Ethel Yossem Endowed Chair in Legal Ethics, Larry L. Teply holds an endowed chair, and Michael J. Kelly holds the Senator Allen A. Sekt Endowed Chair. Terry M. Anderson and Catherine M. Brooks round out a faculty list that mixes long-tenured scholars with newer hires such as Anton Chaevitch, Leigh Ellis, and Adam Garzoli.
Creighton describes a 9:1 student-faculty ratio and reports that most upper-year classes run under 25 students, paired with a mentoring structure that pairs incoming students with 2L mentors. As a Jesuit, Catholic institution, the school frames its academic mission around "educating the whole person," and that mission extends into study-abroad options including a Spain exchange, a Dominican Republic immersion trip, and the Nuremberg Summer Program, plus a poverty law program launched in 2017. Notably, the school's dean has stated Creighton does not participate in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings survey — a deliberate institutional stance applicants should factor in if they're using rankings to compare programs.
Creighton's alumni network runs thick through Nebraska's own courts and statehouse, and it also reaches Washington. Mike Johanns is the clearest example of that reach: a Creighton-trained lawyer who became Nebraska's governor, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and a United States Senator. On the federal bench, Creighton alumni include Robert F. Rossiter Jr., Chief United States District Judge for the District of Nebraska, along with fellow District of Nebraska judges Joseph Bataillon, Susan M. Bazis, and Lyle Elmer Strom, plus Robert W. Pratt on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.
At the state supreme court level, the list includes Nebraska Supreme Court justices William M. Connolly, Michael McCormack, Frederick Messmore, and Robert L. Smith — a concentration that, combined with the Nebraska Supreme Court's practice of holding an annual session inside the Ahmanson Law Center, underscores how tightly the school is woven into the state's judiciary. Beyond Nebraska, Clair Roddewig served as the 14th Attorney General of South Dakota, and Frank A. Barrett served as Governor of Wyoming.
Creighton alumni have also represented constituents in Congress: Brad Ashford, John Joseph Cavanaugh III, Lee Terry, Eugene O'Sullivan, and Robert Vernon Denney (who later became a U.S. District Judge) all served in the U.S. House. In federal law enforcement and executive-branch roles, Laura Duffy served as United States Attorney for the Southern District of California, John McKay served as a United States Attorney, Francis P. Matthews served as United States Secretary of the Navy, and Cheryl L. Mason chaired the Board of Veterans' Appeals at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Closer to home, state legislators Ernie Chambers, Steve Lathrop, and Patrick Bourne built careers in the Nebraska Legislature, while Matt Schultz served as Iowa Secretary of State and Mike Reasoner and Doug Struyk served in the Iowa House — a reminder that the Omaha location puts Creighton graduates within easy reach of both Nebraska and western Iowa's state governments.
Taken together, this roster shows a school whose placement strength is regional and public-sector-heavy rather than built around national Big Law pipelines: judgeships, state legislatures, attorney general and U.S. attorney posts, and one U.S. Senate seat, concentrated heavily in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Applicants aiming at a Nebraska judicial clerkship, a state legislative staff role, or elected office in the region will find a genuine, decades-deep alumni presence in exactly those lanes.
Creighton's law school builds several paths around its standard three-year JD: a two-year Accelerated JD for students who want to finish faster, a roughly four-year part-time JD for those balancing work or family obligations, and a BSBA/JD 3/3 program that lets Creighton undergraduates move into law school a year early. Students interested in business law have an MBA/JD joint degree, and two more targeted dual-degree options exist for students aiming outside conventional practice: a JD/MS in Government Organization and Leadership (GOAL) and a JD/MS in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, the latter connected to the school's Werner Institute.
On the curricular side, Creighton offers six named concentrations: Health Law, Family Law, Business, Commercial and Tax Law, Criminal Law and Procedure, International and Comparative Law, and Litigation. Health Law has a named director, Sarah Gloden Carlson, giving that track a clear point of contact and suggesting it's more than a list of electives.
For applicants deciding among these, the practical question is speed versus depth: the Accelerated JD compresses the timeline for students confident in their focus, while the joint-degree options (MBA/JD, GOAL, Negotiation and Conflict Resolution) suit those planning a career that blends legal training with business, public administration, or dispute-resolution work.
Your LSAT and GPA matter most in relation to where they sit against a school's published 25th/50th/75th percentile bands — not as a predictor of admission, but as a planning anchor for how your application and scholarship offer are likely to be read. Creighton's reported bands run 150/153/156 on the LSAT and 3.14/3.51/3.74 on GPA. A 153 with a mid-3.5 GPA lines up with Creighton's median applicant; a 156 and a GPA near 3.7 puts you at the school's 75th percentile on both measures, which is generally the range where merit scholarship conversations get more favorable. A 150 and a GPA near 3.1 sits at the 25th percentile — still within the range Creighton regularly admits, but worth pairing with a stronger written component of the file if you can control it.
Because the current LSAT (since August 2024) is two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, with Logic Games gone and an unscored Argumentative Writing sample submitted separately, most applicants improve their score through sustained work with official practice material over several months rather than a single short cram. Schools consider your highest score, so if your current number sits below Creighton's median, a retake aimed at moving from the low-150s toward 153+ (or from 153 toward 156+) is the highest-leverage step before you submit — see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat for the mechanics of building a study plan.
Apply well before Creighton's stated deadlines, not on them: the school lists an Early Action deadline of November 1, a Priority Scholarship deadline of February 1, and a Final Application deadline of June 1 for Fall term. Because law school admissions generally run on rolling review, seats and scholarship dollars tend to be more available earlier in the cycle — filing by November 1 for Early Action puts you in the first decision round, and filing by February 1 keeps you eligible for the fullest scholarship consideration even if you don't apply Early Action.
In practice, that means working backward from those dates: give yourself time to sit for the LSAT (and retake it if needed) before your target submission window, request transcripts and letters of recommendation early since those often take weeks to arrive, and treat the personal statement as a document worth several drafts rather than something finished the week of a deadline. Because Creighton's Final Application deadline stretches all the way to June 1, the school does leave room for later applicants, though the Priority Scholarship deadline of February 1 is an earlier, separate date worth tracking on its own. For a fuller walk-through of building an application calendar backward from target deadlines, see /law-school-application-timeline.
Creighton's own data pack does not report a current tuition figure or a total cost-of-attendance estimate, so any specific tuition number you see elsewhere should be verified directly with the school's financial aid office before you build a budget around it. What the pack does show is the living-expense estimate the school itself uses for budgeting: about $23,400 a year for a student living off campus in Omaha, plus a financial aid picture in which 89% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $25,600 among grant recipients. Aid isn't distributed evenly, either — Creighton's own bands show roughly 45% of students getting less than half-tuition grants, 28% getting between half and full tuition, and about 13% receiving a full-tuition grant. That spread means two students with similar numbers can end up with very different net prices, so the scholarship letter you actually receive matters more than any average.
On the borrowing side, the federal rules matter regardless of which law school you attend. As of the 2025-26 cycle (verify current figures before relying on them), Grad PLUS loans have been eliminated for new borrowers, and law — treated as a professional program — is capped at $50,000 a year and $200,000 in aggregate for the Direct Unsubsidized loan, within an overall $257,500 lifetime federal limit. The rate is expected to run around 8.07% for 2026-27 with roughly a 1.057% origination fee. Because federal loans alone may not cover tuition plus Creighton's own $23,400 living-expense estimate for a given year, any gap has to be filled with scholarship money, savings, or private loans — which makes the size of your Creighton grant letter, not just the sticker price, the number that actually determines your borrowing need.
Repayment options have also narrowed to two: a Tiered Standard Plan, which is the default and earns no credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), an income-driven plan running roughly 1-10% of adjusted gross income with a $10 minimum payment. If your plan after Creighton involves government or nonprofit work — the pack shows about 13.3% of recent graduates in government roles and 5.3% in public interest — PSLF remains statutorily intact and forgives remaining federal loans tax-free after 120 qualifying monthly payments, but only if you actively enroll in RAP rather than defaulting into the Standard Plan. Graduates heading toward larger firms typically plan to repay directly rather than rely on forgiveness. For the mechanics of comparing scholarship offers against projected debt, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation and /law-school-loans-and-pslf; for a broader framework on weighing total cost against likely outcomes, see /is-law-school-worth-it.
The honest answer is: it depends heavily on whether you get meaningful scholarship money and whether your career goal is a Nebraska or Midwest-based legal career rather than a Big Law track. Creighton's own outcomes data gives you three levers to weigh — bar passage, employment mix, and aid generosity — and none of them point to a single verdict; they point to a calculation you need to run with your own numbers.
Start with the bar exam, because it's the gate everything else depends on. Creighton's first-time bar passage rate sits at 71.17%, against a state average of 79.36% — roughly an 8-point gap on the first attempt. The two-year ultimate pass rate climbs to 77.78%, which tells you a meaningful share of graduates who don't pass on the first try do pass eventually, but it also means you should budget, mentally and financially, for the possibility of a second sitting. As of the 2025-26 cycle, states like Nebraska use bar formats that are evolving (the broader shift toward the NCBE's NextGen exam is scheduled for 2028 in many jurisdictions), so treat exact passage mechanics as something to verify directly with the school and state board rather than assume from general bar-exam knowledge — see the shared LSAT and bar-prep context for how these transitions typically work.
Next, the job market. Creighton's graduate employment is anchored in Nebraska — it's listed as the largest single employment destination — and the firm-size distribution skews small: the largest cluster of employed graduates (29 of 113, about 25.7%) lands at firms of 1-10 attorneys, with another sizable group at firms of 11-50. Big Law (501+ attorney firms) accounts for just 5.3% of the class, six graduates total. Government work (13.3%) and a handful of federal and state clerkships round out the picture. None of this is unusual for a regional Jesuit law school whose mission and geography point toward local and regional practice — but it does mean that if your goal is a six-figure Big Law salary out of the gate, Creighton's placement data suggests that's the outcome for a small minority, not the norm. If your goal is to practice in Omaha, elsewhere in Nebraska, or a similar Midwest market in a small or mid-size firm, government office, or business role, the placement pattern looks like exactly what you'd expect from a school built for that market.
Now the aid side, which is where "worth it" often gets decided. Creighton reports that 89% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $25,600. But that generosity is not evenly distributed: 45% of grant recipients get less than half of tuition covered, 28% get between half and full tuition, and only 13% get a full ride. In practice, that means most admitted students should expect a partial discount, not a free ride, and the size of that discount will usually track how your LSAT and GPA compare to Creighton's medians (LSAT 153, GPA 3.51), a topic covered in depth on the scholarship-negotiation spoke page. Because Creighton's own tuition figure isn't cleanly reported in the data available here, run your own net-price math using your actual award letter rather than a published sticker price.
Finally, the financing backdrop matters more than it used to. As of the 2025-26 cycle, Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, federal Direct Unsubsidized loans cap out at $50,000 a year, and the default repayment plan earns zero PSLF credit — you'd need to actively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan to build toward forgiveness. Given that only about 13% of Creighton's class enters government roles and 5% public interest, PSLF is a real but minority-relevant path here, not the default plan for most graduates.
Put together: Creighton Law is most defensible for applicants who want to practice in Nebraska or the surrounding region, who receive a scholarship that meaningfully lowers the net cost relative to that regional salary reality, and who go in clear-eyed about a first-time bar pass rate below the state average. It's a harder case to make if you're borrowing near full sticker price while chasing a national Big Law outcome the placement data shows is uncommon here. For the general mechanics behind this calculation, see the shared worth-it and loan/PSLF framework pages.