Lewis & Clark earned this reputation the hard way, over five decades, and U.S. News still validates it: in the 2026-27 rankings the school ties UC Berkeley for #2 in Environmental Law nationally, even while its overall rank sits at #112. That gap between subject-specific and general rank is the single most important thing to understand about this school — it is a niche powerhouse housed inside a regionally-oriented, moderately-ranked JD program, and whether that combination fits you depends entirely on what you want to practice.
The environmental credential is not marketing gloss. Faculty founded the Environmental Law journal in 1969. Around that core sit an unusual density of dedicated centers: Earthrise Law Center, the Green Energy Institute, the Natural Resources Law Institute, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center (NEDC), the Western Resources Legal Center (WRLC), and the International Environmental Law Project (IELP). Each functions as a semi-independent research and practice hub, not just a course listing, giving students real casework, clinics, and networking lines into environmental and natural-resources practice rather than only doctrinal classes. The school backs this with its own LLM and MSL degrees in Environmental, Natural Resources, and Energy Law.
The animal law side of the identity is, if anything, more singular. Lewis & Clark students organized the first Animal Law Conference in the United States in 1992, years before animal law existed as a recognized field anywhere. The school's Center for Animal Law Studies (CALS), founded in 2008, is described in the school's own materials as the first formal animal law program in the world, and it gave rise to the Animal Law Clinic — a clinic most law schools simply do not offer, because most law schools do not treat animal law as a discrete practice area. In 2012, CALS added the first post-JD LLM in Animal Law ever launched, and the school also offers a matching MSL. The Animal Law Review is the school's second specialty journal. If you have any interest in wildlife law, farmed-animal welfare litigation, or the growing intersection of animal law with environmental and food-system regulation, this is one of a small handful of schools in the country where that interest can be a structured course of study rather than a side project.
The school leans into both identities institutionally. It permanently hosts the National NALSA Moot Court Competition and the ILSA Pacific Regional Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, and in 2013 Chief Justice John G. Roberts launched the school's Environmental Moot Court Competition, presiding as guest judge — a level of outside validation that a school ranked around #112 overall does not typically attract. Global summer externship placements in Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Beijing, and Shanghai extend the environmental and international-law emphasis abroad. Locally, the campus sits adjacent to Tryon Creek State Park with access to 14 miles of trails, a physical setting that mirrors the subject matter, four miles from downtown Portland.
What this does not automatically mean is that every Lewis & Clark graduate practices environmental or animal law, or that the brand substitutes for the school's overall market position. The concentrations offered by the school — Environmental Law, Animal Law, Public Interest Law, and the Lawyering Program — describe structured curricular tracks, but the data pack does not report what share of each graduating class actually places into environmental or animal law jobs specifically (see the placement section below for what the employment data does and does not show). For an applicant who already knows they want to spend a career in natural resources law, wildlife litigation, or animal welfare policy, Lewis & Clark's infrastructure — journals, clinics, centers, LLM cohorts, and moot court pedigree — is genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else. For an applicant who is undecided or oriented toward general commercial practice, the specialty brand is a real asset but not a reason by itself to discount the school's #112 general ranking or its regional footprint in weighing offers against other options.
Partly, but the school's own outcomes data measures employer type and geography, not practice specialty, so there is no reported figure showing how many graduates specifically land environmental or animal law jobs — and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What the data pack does show is a class that places solidly but not spectacularly, skews heavily toward small and mid-size firms and Oregon itself, and passes the bar at a rate well above the state average.
Of the 153 graduates counted, 87.6% obtained full-time, long-term employment in a job that was bar-required or JD-advantage — the standard ABA outcomes measure. A separately reported figure describes 78% of the Class of 2024 as obtaining full-time, long-term JD-required or JD-preferred employment nine months out, alongside a Law School Transparency under-employment score of 18.6%. These two figures use different definitions or reporting windows and should not be read as contradictory so much as measuring slightly different things; either way, roughly one in five to one in eight graduates falls outside the strongest employment categories, which is worth weighing against the cost of attendance.
On firm placement, the size distribution is telling. Of employed graduates, 31 landed at firms of 1-10 attorneys and 19 at firms of 11-25 — together the large majority of firm placements — while only a handful reached bigger firms: 5 at 26-50 attorneys, 3 at 51-100, 3 at 101-250, 3 at 251-500, and just 4 graduates, or 2.6% of the class, at firms of 501 or more attorneys (the 'Big Law' category). That 2.6% Big Law rate is low in absolute terms and tells you that Lewis & Clark is not, for most students, a pipeline into the largest national firms — a fact that matters regardless of specialty, since even environmental and natural-resources practices at the biggest firms are typically staffed from that same small Big Law-bound cohort.
Government and public-interest work, by contrast, make up a meaningful share of outcomes: 12 graduates (7.8%) went into government jobs and 26 (17%) into public interest work, together accounting for roughly a quarter of the class. That combined public-sector share is where you would expect much of the environmental and animal-law-oriented output to land — state and federal environmental agencies, natural-resources departments, and public-interest environmental or animal-advocacy organizations are classic destinations for graduates trained through Earthrise, NEDC, WRLC, IELP, or the Animal Law Clinic — but the pack does not break out how many of these 38 government-and-public-interest placements are environmental or animal law roles specifically versus other public-sector work. Ten graduates went into business and industry. Clerkships were modest: 2 federal and 18 state/local, the latter suggesting real traction with Oregon's state courts specifically.
Geography reinforces the regional character of the brand: the largest reported employment category is simply 'Oregon,' meaning the dominant outcome for a Lewis & Clark graduate is practicing in-state, not landing a national environmental-law seat in Washington, D.C. or a coastal hub. That is consistent with a school whose specialty centers are locally embedded — NEDC and WRLC, for instance, are explicitly regional natural-resources organizations.
On bar passage, the school performs well above its jurisdiction's average: an 86.67% first-time pass rate against a state average of 77.12%, with an 86.06% ultimate pass rate within two years. That gap is a genuine positive signal about the school's academic and bar-prep support, independent of the environmental/animal law brand.
Put together: the environmental and animal law identity gives Lewis & Clark graduates a credible, well-resourced route into Oregon and Pacific Northwest natural-resources practice, government environmental agencies, and public-interest advocacy work, and it is a real differentiator for that narrow slice of legal careers. It is not evidence of broad Big Law access, and the data does not support a claim that the brand systematically converts into environmental-specific jobs at scale — that granularity simply is not reported.
Lewis & Clark graduates pass the Oregon bar exam at a first-time rate of 86.67%, about nine and a half points above the statewide average of 77.12% for the same administration. Measured over a longer horizon, the school's ultimate two-year bar passage rate is 86.06%, meaning the large majority of graduates who don't pass on the first attempt clear the bar within two years of graduating.
Of the 153 graduates in the disclosed cohort, 87.6% landed in jobs requiring bar passage or a JD advantage on a full-time, long-term basis. Lewis & Clark's own reporting also shows that 78% of the Class of 2024 secured full-time, long-term employment in a JD-required or JD-preferred role within nine months of graduation, with a Law School Transparency under-employment score of 18.6% — a useful, if imperfect, gauge of how many graduates ended up in short-term, part-time, or non-JD work.
Oregon itself is the single largest destination for graduates, consistent with a school whose clinics, externships, and bar-prep pipeline are built around this state's courts and agencies. Among employed graduates, the firm-size breakdown skews small and mid-size: 31 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 19 to firms of 11-25, and smaller numbers moved into the 26-50, 51-100, 101-250, and 251-500 bands. Only 4 graduates (2.6%) landed at firms of 501 or more attorneys — the segment sometimes called "Big Law." That distribution signals that Lewis & Clark functions primarily as a regional and public-sector pipeline rather than a large-firm feeder.
Outside private practice, 12 graduates (7.8%) went into government jobs and 26 (17.0%) into public interest positions — together accounting for roughly a quarter of the class. Clerkships add another 20 graduates: 2 at the federal level and 18 in state or local courts, reinforcing the school's ties to Oregon's judiciary. A smaller cohort of 10 graduates moved into business and industry roles.
Taken together, the bar and employment numbers tell a consistent story: Lewis & Clark graduates pass the Oregon bar at a rate meaningfully above the state average, and most who pass go on to practice in Oregon itself — concentrated in smaller firms, government offices, public interest organizations, and state court clerkships, with large-firm placement remaining a small slice of outcomes.
At Lewis & Clark, the entering class's LSAT sits at a 25th percentile of 158, a median of 161, and a 75th percentile of 166; GPA runs 3.24 / 3.59 / 3.79 across the same percentiles. Those six numbers are planning anchors, not a threshold you either clear or don't — a 161 LSAT puts you at the school's reported median, a 166 puts you at its 75th percentile, and a 158 sits at its 25th percentile alongside a substantial share of admitted students.
The school received 1,133 applications and extended 620 offers, an acceptance rate of 54.72%, filling a class of 176 students (156 full-time, 20 part-time). An acceptance rate above 50% is on the more accessible end of the law school spectrum, but it doesn't tell you where any individual applicant will land relative to the class — that's what the LSAT/GPA bands are for.
The gap between Lewis & Clark's 25th percentile (158) and 75th percentile (166) is wide by law school standards, which means the file review process is doing real work across that range rather than sorting almost everyone into a narrow band. If your LSAT sits below 158 or your GPA sits below 3.24, you're below where most of the class landed on at least one metric, though schools weigh softs, addenda, and the two numbers together rather than in isolation. If you're at or above the 166/3.79 combination, you're in the school's strongest reported band — a position that, as the scholarship section below discusses, tends to correlate with how law schools allocate their most generous merit aid.
Because the LSAT changed format in August 2024 — dropping Logic Games and narrowing to two scored Logical Reasoning sections plus one scored Reading Comprehension section — applicants studying now should make sure their practice material reflects the current test. Schools consider an applicant's highest reported score, so multiple sittings can matter if your first score lands below where you're aiming relative to Lewis & Clark's medians. For structured guidance on building a study plan around the current format, see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat, and for how LSAT timing interacts with application deadlines and rolling decisions generally, see /law-school-application-timeline.
None of this is a prediction of your admission outcome — it's a way to read where your numbers would sit inside a class that already exists, so you can calibrate expectations and, more usefully, anticipate how your file might be treated in the scholarship process rather than the admissions decision alone.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
A 95% grant rate sounds like nearly everyone gets significant help, but the more important number is how much: the median grant among full-time students is $26,000 against $61,434 in annual tuition and an estimated full cost of attendance near $89,854. That means the typical grant recipient is still covering roughly $35,000 a year in tuition alone before living costs, which the school estimates separately at $28,370 for a student living off campus.
Of students receiving grants, 54% get less than half of tuition covered, 41% get between half and full tuition, and 0% receive a full-tuition award. In other words, a broad grant rate can coexist with a fairly modest typical discount — most recipients are in the "some help, not a game-changer" band rather than the top tier. This is a common pattern across law schools generally: a headline percentage of students "receiving aid" measures breadth, not depth, and the two numbers need to be read together rather than separately.
Some law schools attach GPA or class-rank conditions to merit scholarships, so a portion of the entering class loses part of their award after first year if they fall below a set benchmark — a mechanic worth asking about directly at any school you're considering. Lewis & Clark's disclosed data for the three most recent cohorts shows no students recorded as having had scholarships reduced or eliminated, though it isn't fully clear from the disclosure whether that reflects an absence of conditional scholarship structures or simply how the data was reported for those years; applicants should confirm scholarship terms directly with the admissions office before relying on this pattern.
Treat any offer as a starting point, not a final number. Because federal Direct Unsubsidized loans are capped — $50,000 per year and $200,000 aggregate for law, within a $257,500 lifetime federal limit — and Grad PLUS is no longer available to new borrowers, the gap between your grant, your savings, and the school's roughly $89,854 estimated annual cost of attendance is money you'd otherwise need to borrow privately or fund another way. If you're sitting at or above Lewis & Clark's LSAT/GPA medians, it's reasonable to ask whether a competing offer from a peer school, or a follow-up conversation with Lewis & Clark's own financial aid office, could move your number — a process covered in general terms at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation. For how the loan caps, repayment plans, and PSLF eligibility interact with whatever you end up borrowing, see /law-school-loans-and-pslf, and for a broader framework on weighing sticker price against likely outcomes, see /is-law-school-worth-it.
Yes — Lewis & Clark runs one of the more heavily used experiential curricula among smaller law schools, and the numbers back that up: of 156 clinic seats offered, 113 were filled, alongside 220 filled field-placement seats and 258 filled simulation-course seats, plus 14 co-curricular offerings. For a school with roughly 519 total JD students, that is a significant share of the student body doing supervised, practice-based work rather than sitting only in doctrinal classrooms.
The flagship is the Animal Law Clinic, which grew out of the Center for Animal Law Studies (CALS), founded in 2008 as the first formal animal law program in the world. Lewis & Clark students helped found the first Animal Law Conference in the U.S. back in 1992, and the school later launched the first post-JD LLM in Animal Law, in 2012. Students in the clinic work on live animal-law matters under faculty supervision, a rarity even among schools that teach the subject as a seminar.
Environmental law is the other pillar of the hands-on curriculum, run through a cluster of affiliated centers rather than a single clinic: Earthrise Law Center, the Green Energy Institute, the Natural Resources Law Institute, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center (NEDC), the Western Resources Legal Center (WRLC), and the International Environmental Law Project (IELP).
Beyond the clinics, the Lawyering Program functions as the school's structured skills track, and field placements extend outside Oregon: Lewis & Clark runs global summer externships in India (Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai) and in Asia (Beijing, Shanghai), giving students international placement options that are unusual for a school of this size.
Moot court is another area where the school has built durable, national infrastructure rather than one-off teams. Lewis & Clark is a permanent host site for the National NALSA Moot Court Competition and the ILSA Pacific Regional Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, and its own Environmental Moot Court Competition was launched in 2013 with then-Chief Justice John G. Roberts presiding as guest judge — a signal of how seriously the environmental program is treated outside the school as well as inside it.
Taken together, the clinic-seat, field-placement, and simulation-course fill rates suggest that a large fraction of students who want hands-on training can get it, concentrated heavily — though not exclusively — in animal law and environmental/natural-resources practice, the school's two signature strengths.
Lewis & Clark Law School sits on Palatine Hill, about four miles from downtown Portland, Oregon, on the same wooded campus as Lewis & Clark College's undergraduate campus, and directly adjacent to Tryon Creek State Park, which offers roughly 14 miles of biking and jogging trails accessible right from campus. It's a green, semi-rural setting rather than a downtown high-rise law school, which shapes daily life more toward a self-contained campus community than an urban commuter one.
Academically, the hub is the Paul L. Boley Law Library, the largest law library in Oregon with more than 500,000 volumes as of 2025 — a substantial research resource for a school with a total JD enrollment of 519 students and an entering class of 176 (156 full-time, 20 part-time).
The school's identity is closely tied to its research centers — the Center for Animal Law Studies, Earthrise Law Center, and several other environmental institutes are physically and programmatically part of daily campus life, not just names on a letterhead, since students in those areas work through the centers for clinics, journals, and events.
Given the size of the entering class and total enrollment, Lewis & Clark functions as a comparatively small, close-knit law community layered onto a larger private-college campus, with Portland itself — and its legal market, judiciary, and public-interest organizations — a short drive away rather than at the school's doorstep.
If you want to see how deeply a law school can embed itself in one state's institutions, Lewis & Clark is a strong example: Oregon is listed as the school's largest single employment destination for graduates, and its alumni roster includes a sitting governor, multiple members of Congress, and a long line of state and federal judges.
On the political and government side, alumni include Kate Brown (1985), the 38th Governor of Oregon; U.S. Representatives Cliff Bentz (1979) and Earl Blumenauer (1976); former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp (1980) of North Dakota, who is also a former North Dakota Attorney General; former Oregon Attorney General Charles Crookham (1951); and former Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan (2009). The bench is especially deep for a school this size: alumni have served as Chief Judge and Senior Judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon (Anna Brown, Robert E. Jones, Garr King, Michael J. McShane, Owen M. Panner), and several have sat on the Oregon Supreme Court, including Betty Roberts (1966), the court's first female justice, and Bronson James (2003). Mercedes Deiz (1959) was the first Black woman admitted to the Oregon State Bar and later a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge.
The school's employment data for recent graduates lines up with that public-sector orientation. Of 153 total graduates in the reporting class, 12 (7.8%) went into government work and 26 (17%) into public interest roles — together nearly a quarter of the class — while 18 graduates secured state or local clerkships and 2 landed federal clerkships. Law firm placement skews toward smaller Oregon-style practices: 31 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys and 19 to firms of 11-25, compared to just 4 graduates (2.6%) placed at the largest firms (501+ attorneys). That distribution is consistent with a school whose institutional gravity pulls toward Oregon's courts, agencies, and public-interest sector rather than national Big Law markets.
Beyond law and government, alumni have moved into related public roles, including former senior CIA official Ronald A. Marks (1979), former White House Director of Legislative Affairs Phil Schiliro (1981), and former U.S. Ambassador Donald C. Johnson (1974) — evidence that the school's network extends into federal policy and diplomatic roles as well as Oregon state government.
For an applicant weighing this school, the honest read is that Lewis & Clark's clearest track record of influence runs through Oregon's own government, judiciary, and public-interest institutions, with Big Law placement remaining a minority outcome for graduates.
For most Lewis & Clark students, the honest answer depends less on the sticker price than on what you pay after scholarships and where you plan to practice. The school's published full cost of attendance for a full-time 1L, including tuition, fees, and living costs, lands right around $89,854 a year — the $90K figure in the question isn't an exaggeration, it's close to the actual number. But that figure is a ceiling, not a floor: 95% of students receive some grant aid, and the median grant among full-time students is $26,000 a year, which meaningfully changes the real cost for most admits. Roughly 41% of students land in a half-tuition-to-full-tuition scholarship band, while 54% receive smaller awards below half tuition — worth working through with the school's own award letter rather than assuming either extreme.
The employment outcomes matter more than the price tag in isolation. Lewis & Clark places 87.6% of graduates in full-time, long-term jobs that are bar-required or JD-advantage, and only 2.6% of the most recent graduating class went to firms of 501+ attorneys — the Big Law tier. That's not a knock on the school; it reflects the honest reality that Lewis & Clark is not primarily a Big Law feeder, and its own numbers say so plainly. Instead, the bulk of graduates land at smaller firms (31 graduates at firms of 1-10 attorneys, 19 at 11-25), in government (7.8%), or in public interest work (17%) — and Oregon itself is the single largest destination for graduates, meaning this is fundamentally a school for people who want to build a career in the Pacific Northwest, not a national platform for six-figure entry-level salaries at the biggest firms.
If your plan involves government, public interest, or a smaller firm — which is where most Lewis & Clark graduates actually go — the compensation math looks very different than the Big Law bimodal salary curve. Salaries in those tracks tend to sit well below the $215,000 Big Law peak, which makes the size of your debt load, not just your future income, the central variable in whether the degree pays off. That's exactly why the grant data matters so much here: a student who negotiates a strong scholarship and keeps borrowing close to the federal caps is in a very different financial position than one paying full freight. Because Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new federal borrowers and the Direct Unsubsidized Loan is capped at $50,000 a year (verify current figures for your entry year), students who don't secure meaningful grant aid may need to bridge a gap with private loans — a real risk to weigh against a school whose median outcomes point toward public-sector and smaller-firm salaries rather than Big Law paychecks.
On the repayment side, if you're heading into government or 501(c)(3) public interest work — a track roughly a quarter of the class pursues here, combining the 7.8% government and 17% public interest figures — Public Service Loan Forgiveness remains statutorily intact and can meaningfully change the debt calculus over a 10-year horizon, but only if you actively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan rather than the default Standard Plan (see the loans and PSLF spoke for the mechanics). One underrated data point worth weighing into the cost-benefit: Lewis & Clark's first-time bar pass rate of 86.67% comfortably outpaces the Oregon state average of 77.12%, which is a real signal about how well the school prepares students for licensure — a threshold cost that has to be cleared before any of the employment numbers become relevant at all.
Put simply: $90K a year is worth it if your award letter gets your real cost meaningfully below that, and if your career plan matches where Lewis & Clark actually places people — Oregon, smaller firms, government, and public interest — rather than a national Big Law track this school does not primarily serve.
Start by locating your own numbers against Lewis & Clark's published medians rather than asking whether you'll get in. The school's LSAT 25th/50th/75th percentiles are 158/161/166, and its GPA 25th/50th/75th are 3.24/3.59/3.79. A 161 LSAT and a 3.59 GPA sit at the school's median; a 166 and a 3.79 put you at its 75th percentile, which is generally where scholarship leverage strengthens (see the scholarship negotiation spoke for how to use that position). A profile below the 25th percentile on either metric doesn't tell you your odds — it tells you that your file will lean more heavily on the rest of your application to make the case.
Lewis & Clark received 1,133 applications and extended 620 offers for a recent cycle, an acceptance rate of about 54.7%, and enrolled a class of 176 students (156 full-time, 20 part-time). The part-time option is worth flagging early if you're weighing work or family obligations against a JD — it's a real, separate track here, not an afterthought, and it may call for a different application strategy and timeline than the full-time track.
Beyond the numbers, treat your LSAT prep as the single highest-leverage use of your time before you apply: the current test is two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, with Logic Games gone since August 2024, and most meaningful score movement comes from sustained, disciplined use of official practice material over months rather than weeks (the LSAT-prep spoke walks through a study plan). Build your application timeline backward from your target term, since law school cycles typically reward earlier filing with more scholarship funds still on the table — a generic mechanic that applies with particular force at a school like Lewis & Clark where 95% of students receive some grant aid and award budgets are finite. The law school application timeline spoke covers the generic cycle mechanics in more depth.