It means attending the only law school in Memphis inside a building that once processed the city's maritime customs duties, not a glass-and-steel legal academic complex. The University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law occupies a renovated 19th-century U.S. Customs House on the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, a structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 and previously used as a federal courthouse and post office before its conversion into a law school.
The move from the university's main campus to this downtown site was officially announced in 2006 and completed in time for classes by January 2010, financed in part by a $41 million pledge from former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen. That relocation reshaped how the school presents itself: rather than a generic academic building, students study, brief, and argue inside a preserved federal courtroom that the school now uses as its moot courtroom, and research in the Plough Law Library, which occupies the building's South Wing and holds roughly 250,000 to 270,000 volumes.
The building's character has translated into external recognition beyond aesthetics. National Jurist and preLaw magazine named it the 'Best Law School Facilities in the Nation' in 2014 and separately recognized it as the 'Best Law School Building in the Nation.' Princeton Review ranked the school among the top 10 nationally for quality of life following the 2010 move. National Jurist has also repeatedly named Memphis Law a 'best value' school, including an A- grade in 2018.
Beyond its physical form, the Customs House carries institutional memory that a newer building could not. The Tennessee Supreme Court convened inside the building on November 4, 2010, using the school's space as a working courtroom rather than a museum piece. The building has also had a life in popular culture, appearing fictionally in the 1997 film 'The Rainmaker' and referenced in 'The Client,' both associated with Memphis's legal-drama identity.
The law school itself predates the building by decades. It was founded in 1962 as Memphis State University College of Law, gained ABA accreditation in 1965, and was later named for former University president Cecil C. Humphreys. Memphis businessman Herbert Herff was a major early benefactor whose estate, following his death in 1966, funded scholarships and the Herbert Herff Chair of Excellence in Law — a chair now held by faculty member Andrew McClurg. The school joined the Association of American Law Schools in 2001 and marked its semicentennial in September 2012, roughly two years after settling into the Customs House.
For a prospective student, the practical upshot is that Memphis Law's identity is inseparable from its downtown, historic setting on the river — a working federal landmark repurposed for legal education rather than built for it, in a city where the school holds a singular position as the only law school in Memphis.
A 155 LSAT and a 3.53 GPA place you almost exactly at Memphis Law's published medians for its most recent entering class — meaning your numbers sit at the center of the class, not toward either edge. The school's reported 25th/50th/75th percentile LSAT band is 152/155/159, and its GPA band is 3.22/3.53/3.77, so a 155 and 3.53 land precisely on the 50th percentile for both metrics.
Medians are planning anchors, not predictions of outcome, and Memphis does not publish (nor does this data pack contain) any admissions-odds figures tied to specific score combinations. What the numbers do tell you is how you compare to the range of admitted students the school reports. Someone presenting a 159 LSAT and 3.77 GPA would be at Memphis's 75th percentile on both measures, while a 152 LSAT and 3.22 GPA would sit at the 25th percentile — the lower end of the reported range, not a floor below which admission is impossible, since the school necessarily admits students below its 25th percentile as part of a normal distribution.
Context for how selective this range is: Memphis received 582 applications and extended 239 offers for its most recent reported cycle, an acceptance rate of about 41%, yielding a class of 96 students. That places Memphis in a moderately selective range among public law schools based on its published acceptance rate and LSAT/GPA medians, without indicating any individual applicant's likelihood of admission.
Sixty-two percent of students receive some grant aid, with a reported median grant of $11,000 for full-time students. That aid is stratified: 32% of students receive a grant covering less than half of tuition, 17% receive between half and full tuition, and 5% receive a full-tuition grant — together accounting for 54% of students, with the remaining aided students not further broken out by band in the school's reporting.
Some do, and the retention data is worth reading before you accept an offer. Among students entering with conditional scholarships, the share who saw their award reduced was 25% for the 2024-25 cohort (9 of 36), 38.2% for 2023-24 (13 of 34), and 31.8% for 2022-23 (14 of 44). In other words, in each of the last three reported years, roughly a quarter to more than a third of conditionally-scholarshipped students lost some portion of their award, almost certainly tied to a GPA-retention benchmark. Anyone accepting a conditional scholarship at Memphis should get the specific GPA threshold in writing and treat that retention rate as a real, recurring risk rather than a formality — for general tactics on reading and negotiating scholarship offers, see the scholarship negotiation guide.
Memphis's first-time bar passage rate sits at 72.63%, compared to a statewide first-time average of 79.75% — a gap of just over seven points on the exam most of its graduates sit for. That single number is the headline, but it is not the whole story: the school's own reported two-year ultimate pass rate is 82.86%, meaning a meaningful share of graduates who don't clear the bar on the first attempt do pass it on a later sitting. Anyone using bar passage as a planning input should look at both figures, not just the first-time number that tends to circulate in rankings and press coverage.
Part of the gap is visible in the class profile itself. Memphis's entering LSAT band runs 152 (25th percentile) to 159 (75th percentile), with a median of 155, and its GPA band runs 3.22 to 3.77 with a median of 3.53. A 25th-percentile LSAT of 152 is a meaningfully open admissions floor, meaning a real slice of each entering class starts law school within Memphis's own lower LSAT range rather than near its median or 75th percentile. This is a description of the class's numeric profile as Memphis itself reports it — not a claim that any individual student's LSAT predicts their bar outcome, and the pack does not report a school-specific study linking the two.
The school's own conditional-scholarship data adds another data point worth sitting with. Memphis reports that of 36 students entering in 2024-25 with conditional scholarships, 9 (25%) had their awards reduced after not maintaining the required benchmark, typically tied to first-year GPA. The prior two cohorts show similar patterns: 38.2% of the 2023-24 conditional cohort (13 of 34) had scholarships reduced, and 31.8% of the 2022-23 cohort (14 of 44) did as well. Read together with the LSAT/GPA bands, this is evidence that a nontrivial portion of each class is doing meaningfully weaker 1L academic work than the scholarship award assumed — which is a reasonable proxy for some of the same academic strain that shows up later on a bar exam. Whether that strain is the actual driver of the first-time bar gap is not something the pack states directly, and a prospective student should treat this as informed context, not as a confirmed causal chain.
What the numbers do support cleanly: Memphis's bar outcome is not catastrophic and not average. It clears four out of five graduates within two attempts (82.86%), but it asks a larger share of its class than the Tennessee average to take the bar more than once. For an applicant weighing Memphis, the practical takeaway is to treat the first-time rate as the honest headline number, treat the two-year rate as the honest floor, and to plan — mentally and financially — for the real possibility of a bar-prep-and-retake cycle rather than assuming a first-attempt pass. That is especially relevant for anyone entering near the school's 25th-percentile LSAT band, where the margin for a rocky 1L semester is thinner.
One more caution for anyone comparing this number across schools: the pack does not specify which bar exam(s) the first-time and ultimate figures cover (Tennessee's UBE-based exam, out-of-state sittings, or a mix), nor does it break the rate out by first-time takers who sat in Tennessee versus elsewhere. Tennessee, like New York and Massachusetts, administers the Uniform Bar Exam, which is portable within score and time limits set by each receiving jurisdiction — useful context if a graduate plans to practice outside Tennessee, but not a fact that changes the underlying pass-rate numbers reported here.
Big Law is not the realistic path for most Memphis graduates: only 2 of the school's most recent graduating class of 94 landed jobs at firms of 501+ attorneys, a 2.1% share. If a large-firm associate track is the primary goal, Memphis's own placement data says plainly that this outcome happens for a small handful of graduates each year, not a broad slice of the class.
What does happen, at meaningful scale, is employment overall: 91.5% of the class secured full-time, long-term jobs that were either bar-passage-required or J.D.-advantage positions — a solid overall placement figure that should reassure applicants worried about whether a Memphis J.D. leads to legal work at all. The question worth asking isn't "will I get a job," it's "what kind of job, and where."
The answer, according to Memphis's own reporting, is overwhelmingly local and mid-to-small-firm. The school's largest reported employment category is Tennessee itself, and the firm-size breakdown of the class tells a clear story: 23 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 7 to firms of 11-25, 7 more to firms of 26-50, 4 to firms of 51-100, 4 to firms of 101-250, and 4 to firms of 251-500 — alongside 1 solo practitioner and the 2 who reached the 501+ tier. In plain terms, roughly a quarter of the graduating class went to firms with ten or fewer lawyers, and the modal outcome across the whole distribution is a small or mid-sized Tennessee firm, not a national or regional Big Law shop.
Government and public-interest work absorb a real share of each class too: 11 graduates (11.7%) went into government positions and 10 (10.6%) into public-interest roles, together accounting for more than a fifth of the class. Add in judicial clerkships — 2 federal and 7 state/local — and it's clear that public-sector and court-system work is a substantive, not marginal, part of what a Memphis J.D. is used for. Business and industry roles picked up another 4 graduates.
For an applicant thinking practically about return on investment, the honest framing is this: Memphis functions as the primary regional feeder of new lawyers into Memphis and Tennessee's small-firm, government, and clerkship market, with the occasional graduate reaching a large firm. As the only law school in Memphis, it holds a structural advantage in placing graduates into that city's legal market — judges, prosecutors' offices, small and mid-sized firms, and local government all recruit from a pool where Memphis is the dominant regional supply. That is a genuinely different value proposition than a school built around national Big Law placement, and it should be evaluated on its own terms rather than measured against schools whose economic model depends on 500+-lawyer firm hiring.
Applicants who want Big Law as a serious, likely outcome should treat Memphis's 2.1% placement rate at that tier as a hard data point, not as a floor they can beat through individual effort alone — Big Law hiring at any school is driven heavily by on-campus interview access, and a school where only 2 of 94 graduates land there in a given year is not positioned as a Big Law feeder school. Applicants whose goals are Tennessee-based practice — small firm, government, judiciary, or public interest work in or near Memphis — will find that Memphis's placement pattern lines up closely with exactly that kind of career, and its status as the city's only law school gives it a distinctive foothold in the local hiring market that a national general-market comparison would miss.
The University of Memphis publishes a full-time cost of attendance estimate of $49,957 a year, built from $18,634 in tuition, $2,594 in mandatory fees, and $28,729 in estimated off-campus living expenses. That sticker figure is the starting point — what a given student actually pays turns on whether, and how much, grant aid reduces it.
Memphis reports that 62% of full-time JD students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $11,000 a year among recipients. Applying that median to the published cost of attendance suggests a grant recipient near the middle of the distribution is looking at roughly $38,957 a year before other aid or loans, though your own number depends entirely on where your scholarship falls.
Grant sizes are not evenly distributed. Memphis's own aid bands show 32% of students receiving less than half-tuition, 17% receiving half-to-full tuition, and 5% receiving a full-tuition award — together accounting for 54% of students, with the remaining aided students not further broken out by band in the school's reporting. In other words, most aided students are getting a partial discount rather than a full ride, and the largest single group of grant recipients sits in the smallest-award tier. Separately, Memphis reports that 38% of the class receives no grant at all and pays close to the full $49,957 estimate (adjusted for their own housing choices).
Because Memphis is a public law school, in-state residency matters for the tuition figure itself, though the pack does not break out a separate nonresident tuition rate — only the $18,634 full-time figure and $16,940 part-time figure are reported here. Prospective applicants weighing an offer should ask the admissions office directly how their specific grant letter compares to these published medians and bands, since a letter below the $11,000 median puts a student in the larger, less-discounted segment of the class, while a letter in the half-to-full or full-tuition bands is comparatively rare (22% of students combined land in those two upper bands).
For how to read a scholarship letter against a school's cost of attendance more generally, and how to negotiate before deposit deadlines, see the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation.
Most incoming Memphis scholarship recipients keep their award, but a meaningful minority lose part of it after 1L year. Memphis's own ABA-required conditional scholarship disclosures show that among students whose scholarships carried a GPA or class-rank condition, 25% of the 2024-25 cohort (9 of 36 entering students with conditional awards) had their scholarship reduced or eliminated. The prior two entering classes saw similar or higher reduction rates: 38.2% (13 of 34) for the 2023-24 cohort and 31.8% (14 of 44) for 2022-23.
That means roughly one in three to one in four conditionally-scholarshipped students across these three recent cohorts ended up with a smaller scholarship, or none, after their first year — a real financial risk that sits on top of whatever grant band a given admit starts in. A scholarship offer at Memphis is not automatically a three-year commitment; it is contingent on hitting whatever GPA or standing benchmark the offer letter specifies, and the school's own reported reduction rates give applicants a concrete basis for asking exactly what that benchmark is and how it compares to Memphis's grading distribution before enrolling.
Applicants who are offered a conditional scholarship should request the specific retention terms in writing and ask how many students in recent years met versus missed the condition — the figures above are Memphis's own recent track record, not a guess.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
Memphis Law's alumni network is concentrated in Tennessee public life and the judiciary rather than national Big Law. Graduates include Sixth Circuit Judge Bernice B. Donald (JD '79), Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Holly M. Kirby (JD '82), and federal judges James Dale Todd (JD '72) and S. Thomas Anderson (JD '80) — a track record that points to real strength in placing graduates onto the state and federal bench in Tennessee.
The network also runs deep into elected office: U.S. Representatives Steve Cohen (JD '73) and David Kustoff (JD '92) both hold Memphis JDs, as does former Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland (JD '89), who now serves as the law school's dean, and current Shelby County Mayor and faculty member Lee Harris. Caroline C. Hunter (JD '00) chairs the Federal Election Commission. For applicants interested in Tennessee politics, judicial clerkships, or public service in the Mid-South, this alumni base is a tangible signal of where a Memphis JD tends to lead — locally rooted influence rather than a national large-firm pipeline.
Memphis Law puts a large share of students into supervised practical work well before graduation. The school reports 57 available clinic seats with 47 filled, run through the University of Memphis Legal Clinic, alongside 81 filled field placements and 176 filled simulation-course seats, plus 10 co-curricular offerings. Together these numbers show experiential learning as a heavily used part of the curriculum rather than a niche option.
The school's home is itself part of the training environment: classes and the moot courtroom sit inside a renovated 19th-century U.S. Customs House on the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis, a building that formerly served as a federal courthouse — its preserved federal courtroom is now used for moot court. For applicants weighing how much hands-on practice they'll get before the bar, Memphis's filled clinic, field placement, and simulation numbers are a concrete starting point for questions to admissions about specific case types and supervising attorneys.
Memphis admitted roughly 41% of the 582 applicants in its most recent reported cycle, filling a class of 96 — a acceptance rate that sits well above the most selective national programs but still means most seats go to applicants whose numbers cluster near the school's published medians. Memphis's middle 50% LSAT band runs 152 at the 25th percentile to 159 at the 75th, with a median of 155; the GPA band runs 3.22 to 3.77, median 3.53.
The useful move is to treat these bands as planning anchors, not odds. A 155 LSAT and 3.53 GPA place you at Memphis's reported medians — the statistical center of the admitted class, not a guarantee. A 159 LSAT or 3.77 GPA puts you at Memphis's 75th percentile for that metric. A 152 LSAT or 3.22 GPA sits at the 25th percentile — still within the range Memphis regularly admits from, but likely without the same aid leverage.
Because the scored LSAT is now built entirely from Logical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension sections (Logic Games were retired in August 2024), most applicants improve their score through sustained, official-material practice over several months rather than a single cram session — see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat for the mechanics of a study plan. If your GPA is below Memphis's median, a higher LSAT is generally the more direct lever available to you; if your LSAT already sits at or above 159, further gains matter most for scholarship positioning rather than for the admission decision itself.
Memphis received 582 applications and made 239 offers for its most recent reported cycle, yielding a final class of 96 — meaning the school converts roughly two out of every five applicants into an offer, but ultimately enrolls a relatively small, tight-knit class. A class this size (96 seats) means the school is not admitting in enormous waves; seats can fill as a cycle progresses, which is the general argument for applying earlier rather than later within any admissions cycle.
The data pack does not report Memphis's specific application deadline, fee, or accepted testing formats, so applicants should verify those directly with the admissions office before building a timeline — that is a detail worth confirming rather than assuming. What is generally true across law school admissions, and worth applying here, is that most JD programs use rolling or near-rolling review: files are read and decided as they arrive, so an application submitted in September or October is typically reviewed against a fuller pool of remaining seats than one submitted in February or March. For a program with a relatively modest enrollment target, that timing effect can matter more, not less.
Practically, this means treating your LSAT score as settled before you start submitting materials — retaking after applications are in circulation slows your file down — and lining up recommenders and a personal statement early enough to submit in the first third of the cycle rather than the last. For the general architecture of when to sit the LSAT, request letters, and submit relative to a cycle's opening and closing, see /law-school-application-timeline; layer Memphis's own posted deadline and fee (once confirmed) on top of that generic framework rather than guessing at either.
Memphis's sticker price is genuinely low by law school standards: full-time tuition is reported at $18,634 plus $2,594 in fees, and the school's own estimate of total cost of attendance — tuition, fees, and an off-campus living allowance of $28,729 — comes to roughly $49,957 for a year. That single-year estimate is meaningfully below what many private law schools charge in tuition alone, before living costs are even added, which is the core of Memphis's in-state value proposition.
Aid is common but uneven in size. Memphis reports that 62% of students receive some grant, with a median grant among full-time students of $11,000 — enough to meaningfully offset, but not eliminate, the roughly $21,000 in annual tuition and fees. Looking at how that aid is distributed: 32% of students receive grants covering less than half of tuition, 17% receive grants covering half to full tuition, and only 5% receive a full-tuition award. In other words, most aid recipients get a partial discount rather than a full ride, and a meaningful share of the class pays close to the full sticker price.
One detail worth taking seriously before you sign a scholarship letter: Memphis's own conditional-scholarship data shows real volatility. Among the 2024-25 entering class, 36 students started with conditional scholarships and 9 (25%) had those awards reduced; the prior year, 34 entering students saw 13 (38.2%) reduced; the year before that, 44 entering students saw 14 (31.8%) reduced. That means roughly a quarter to nearly two-fifths of conditionally-scholarshipped students in recent years lost some or all of their aid after 1L grades came in — almost certainly tied to a GPA-retention condition. Anyone accepting a conditional award here should ask, in writing, exactly what GPA or class-rank threshold preserves it, and should budget as if the reduction might happen rather than assuming it won't. For the general mechanics of negotiating and stress-testing a scholarship offer, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
On the borrowing side, federal rules changing for new borrowers as of July 1, 2026 are relevant to anyone financing a JD here: Grad PLUS loans are eliminated, and the federal Direct Unsubsidized loan is capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 aggregate for law, within a $257,500 lifetime federal cap, at a rate of roughly 8.07% for 2026-27 plus about a 1.057% origination fee. Given Memphis's relatively low cost of attendance, a student without significant scholarship support could plausibly cover most or all of a year's cost within that federal annual cap — a materially different math problem than at a school where cost of attendance exceeds $80,000-$90,000 and the Grad PLUS gap has to be filled with private loans. On repayment, only two federal plans exist for new borrowers: a Tiered Standard Plan (the default, which earns no PSLF credit) and the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan, which borrowers must affirmatively choose if they're aiming at Public Service Loan Forgiveness after ten years of qualifying employment. See /law-school-loans-and-pslf for how that election works and /law-school-loans-and-pslf for PSLF's employer and payment-count requirements in more detail.
Memphis Law is best understood as a regional, Tennessee-oriented program rather than a national Big Law pipeline, and its own outcome data supports that framing directly. Of the most recent graduating class of 94, only 2 graduates (2.1%) landed at firms of 501+ attorneys — the segment that anchors the roughly $215,000 large-firm salary peak referenced in national salary surveys. The bulk of employed graduates instead landed at small and mid-sized firms: 23 at firms of 1-10 attorneys, plus smaller clusters across the 11-25, 26-50, 51-100, 101-250, and 251-500 bands, alongside 11 graduates (11.7%) in government roles, 10 (10.6%) in public interest, and a handful of clerkships (2 federal, 7 state/local). Overall, 91.5% of graduates landed in full-time, long-term jobs that were either bar-required or JD-advantage — a solid outcome for a program of this size and cost structure, even without a large-firm concentration.
The honest caveat is on the bar exam. Memphis's first-time bar pass rate is reported at 72.63%, against a state average of 79.75% for the same period — a real gap below the jurisdiction's overall performance. The two-year ultimate pass rate climbs to 82.86%, meaning most graduates who don't pass on the first attempt do pass eventually, but a first-time gap of that size is worth planning around rather than ignoring: budget time and possibly a commercial bar-prep course into your post-graduation plan rather than assuming the JD alone gets you across the finish line on the first try. Jurisdictions using the Uniform Bar Exam, including Tennessee's neighbors, allow a passing UBE score to transfer across UBE states within each state's score and time limits, which matters if your post-Memphis plans could take you outside Tennessee — see /is-law-school-worth-it for how bar mechanics generally factor into a school's overall value proposition.
Where Memphis is credibly strong is as the only law school physically located in Memphis, Tennessee, with a low, in-state-anchored cost of attendance (an estimated $49,957 for a full year including living costs) and a graduate outcome profile — 91.5% employed in bar-required or JD-advantage roles, strong local government and public-interest placement, and firm placement concentrated in small-to-midsize practices — that lines up closely with a career built in Memphis, Shelby County, or Tennessee more broadly. If your goal is a Big Law offer at a national firm, the 2.1% large-firm placement rate says plainly that this is not the path most Memphis graduates take. If your goal is practicing law in West Tennessee — in a small firm, a government office, or a public-interest organization — the outcome data, paired with tuition that is genuinely low relative to national law school pricing, makes a more straightforward case. Run your own numbers against the general framework at /is-law-school-worth-it, but anchor every input to Memphis's own reported figures rather than a national average.