Notre Dame Law School opened in February 1869, making it the second Catholic law school founded in the United States and the oldest in continuous operation. That founding date matters less as trivia than as a throughline: for over 150 years the school has organized its curriculum, hiring, and self-description around the idea of law as a vocation bound up with ethics and service, not simply a technical craft.
The early history shows how deliberately that identity was built. Matthew F. Colovin served as the school's first principal and professor, and when William J. Hoynes took over leadership in 1883, he extended the program from two years to three and introduced Moot Court — a structural choice that still echoes in the school's current emphasis on oral advocacy and the 205-seat Patrick F. McCartan Courtroom. Early classes met in the Main Building and Sorin Hall before Hoynes Hall became the law school's home in 1916; the school later moved into a Gothic-style building on Notre Dame Avenue in 1930, and its library — the Kresge Law Library, funded by S.S. Kresge — grew over subsequent decades. The campus footprint kept evolving into the 21st century: Eck Hall of Law was built in 2007-2008, and Biolchini Hall (the former Kresge building) was renovated in 2010 through a gift from Robert Biolchini.
The Catholic identity is not just architectural. Notre Dame Law's own chapel is dedicated to St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers, and the school houses academic units — the Natural Law Institute, the Program on Church, State & Society, and the Program on Constitutional Structure among them — built explicitly around questions of law, morality, and religious liberty. Faculty associated with this tradition include John Finnis and Gerard V. Bradley. That academic orientation coexists with a broader human-rights and public-interest arm through the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, and with a Loan Repayment Assistance Program aimed at graduates who take public-interest careers — a concrete financial expression of the "law as service" framing rather than just a marketing line.
The school's history also includes a record of expanding who gets to practice this vocation. Maxine Evelyn Ryer became the first woman to study law at Notre Dame in 1921, and in 1970 Graciela Olivarez became the first woman and first Latina to graduate from the program — milestones the school still references as part of its institutional memory.
One of the most distinctive and durable features tracing back to this identity is Notre Dame's global posture. The Notre Dame London Law Programme, running since 1968, is described by the school as the only ABA-approved year-long study-abroad program among U.S. law schools — a claim about program design, not comparative admissions difficulty. It sits alongside exchange arrangements with law schools in Chile, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, and Switzerland. Domestically, the school has built out two more recent placement-style programs: Notre Dame Law in Chicago (since 2013) and Notre Dame Law in DC, run in partnership with Kirkland & Ellis (since 2015) — both of which let students spend a term embedded in a major legal market while still enrolled at Notre Dame.
The school also traces its own clinic history to a legal aid clinic established in 1951, part of its broader role in pioneering clinical legal education. Today that lineage has grown into ten named clinics spanning immigration, exoneration, veterans' law, religious liberty (the Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic), special education, and community development — a footprint that gives the "law as vocation" framing a tangible, casework-based expression rather than leaving it purely in the classroom.
Practicing lawyers and alumni tied to the school's history include U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Amy Coney Barrett (the latter also a former Notre Dame Law faculty member), along with Ann Claire Williams. For prospective students, the oldest-Catholic-law-school framing is less about religious observance as a requirement — Notre Dame does not require it — and more about signaling a specific institutional culture: a 7-to-1 student-faculty ratio, a moot-court and clinical tradition dating back over a century, and academic centers organized around questions of ethics, natural law, and religious liberty that are simply not replicated at most peer law schools.
Notre Dame Law admitted about 16% of applicants for its most recent entering class, making it a highly selective program by any measure. The school received 3,579 applications, extended 575 offers, and enrolled a class of 185 — a acceptance rate of roughly 16.07%, reflecting Notre Dame's current position at #20 in the U.S. News 2026-27 rankings.
The LSAT and GPA numbers give a clearer planning anchor than the acceptance rate alone. Notre Dame's entering class posted an LSAT range of 166 at the 25th percentile, 170 at the median, and 171 at the 75th percentile. On GPA, the 25th-50th-75th percentile split was 3.78, 3.89, and 3.95. These figures describe where the middle 50% of the enrolled class actually sat — not a probability of admission at any given score. An applicant with a 166 LSAT and a 3.78 GPA is positioned at Notre Dame's 25th percentile on both measures, meaning roughly a quarter of the enrolled class scored at or below that level; a 170/3.89 applicant sits squarely at the class medians; and a 171 LSAT with a 3.95 GPA places an applicant at the 75th percentile on both metrics — among the stronger portion of the file pool, though still not a guarantee, since law school admissions committees weigh softs, writing, and narrative alongside numbers.
What these medians mean practically is that Notre Dame's admitted pool clusters tightly in the low-to-mid 170s on LSAT and high-3.8s to mid-3.9s on GPA, which puts the school's academic profile in line with other strong national law schools rather than at the very top of the LSAT distribution (a 180-capped scale). Applicants preparing for the current LSAT format — two scored Logical Reasoning sections, one scored Reading Comprehension section, and no Logic Games — should treat Notre Dame's 170 median as the number that determines whether a retake is worth the time investment; see the shared guide on how to study for the LSAT for general test-prep mechanics.
Scholarship exposure at Notre Dame is broad: 92% of the entering class received grant aid, with a median grant of $30,000 per year against total published cost of attendance near $99,940 (tuition plus fees and estimated living costs). Aid is not distributed evenly across a single band, though — the school's own reporting shows 54% of grant recipients receiving less than half-tuition awards, 31% receiving between half and full tuition, and only 4% receiving full-tuition awards. That distribution matters for how an applicant should read their own numbers: sitting at or above the 170/3.89 medians is the position most likely to be relevant when negotiating within Notre Dame's existing aid bands, though the school's data does not publish a scholarship-by-LSAT-band breakdown, so no specific score-to-dollar claim can be made from the pack. Applicants weighing how their own numbers might translate into a leveraged offer should consult the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation, which explains the general mechanics schools use to set merit awards relative to their own medians.
Yes — for a majority of Notre Dame's graduating class, the answer is effectively both. Of the 164 graduates in the reporting class, 50 (30.5%) went directly into a law firm with more than 500 attorneys, the bracket that includes the large national and international firms typically described as "Big Law." At the same time, 28 graduates (about 17% of the class) landed federal clerkships and another 11 took state or local clerkships, for a combined 39 clerks — nearly a quarter of the class. Add the clerks to the Big Law hires and roughly 54% of Notre Dame's graduating class started in one of these two high-prestige tracks, a concentration that is unusual outside the very top of the rankings.
The school's own materials point to why this dual strength exists rather than one track crowding out the other: Notre Dame Law is cited as ranked #4 nationally for federal clerkship placement, a credential that sits alongside — not in tension with — its Big Law pipeline. Clerkship and Big Law hiring draw on overlapping strengths (top grades, law review, faculty relationships), and a school that produces clerks in volume is usually also producing the credentialed graduates firms want, sometimes after a clerkship year rather than instead of one.
The firm-size data below the 501+ tier also shows the pipeline is not "Big Law or bust." Seven graduates went to firms of 251-500 attorneys and ten to firms of 101-250, meaning 67 graduates (over 40% of the class) landed at a firm of 101+ attorneys. Smaller firm placements exist too — nine graduates in firms of 1-10 attorneys, three in 11-25, six in 26-50 — but they are a minority outcome relative to the large-firm concentration.
Government and public interest employment (20 and 7 graduates, or 12.2% and 4.3% of the class respectively) round out the picture, along with 7 graduates in business and industry roles. Notre Dame also reports that 93.3% of graduates were employed in full-time, long-term positions that were bar-passage-required or JD-advantage roles, a broad measure of how thoroughly the class converted into law-related employment of some kind — clerkship, firm, government, or otherwise.
Two structured D.C. and Chicago pathways feed this outcome. Notre Dame runs a Notre Dame Law in DC program built in partnership with Kirkland & Ellis, an explicit bridge between the classroom and a Big Law firm actively hiring from the school. It also runs a Notre Dame Law in Chicago program, and Illinois is reported as the school's largest single employment destination — consistent with a substantial contingent of graduates entering the Chicago legal market specifically, whether at large firms, clerkships, or other employers based there.
What this means if you are choosing between a clerkship and a firm offer. At most law schools, students feel pressure to pick a lane early — clerk first and delay a firm start, or take the firm offer and skip the clerkship. Notre Dame's numbers suggest the school's placement machinery is built to support both paths simultaneously rather than forcing an early trade-off: with 28 federal clerks and 50 Big Law hires in the same class, a meaningful share of graduates are doing exactly what students hope for — clerking for a judge and still landing at a large firm on the back end (a pattern common nationally, where firms hold offers for clerks). The pack does not break out how many of the 50 Big Law hires clerked first or how many will after their term ends, so that specific sequencing claim cannot be confirmed from the available data — but the raw volume of both outcomes in the same class is unusually high and is, on its own, a fair basis for calling Notre Dame a school where the two tracks reasonably coexist.
What the data pack does not include is a further breakdown of which specific courts (circuit vs. district), which specific Big Law markets outside Chicago, or year-over-year trend lines for either category — so applicants comparing Notre Dame year-to-year should treat this single reporting cycle as a snapshot, not a guaranteed trajectory.
Notre Dame graduates passed the bar on their first attempt at an 89.44% rate, compared to an 81.6% average among all test-takers on that same exam administration — a gap of roughly 8 percentage points. That gap holds up over time, too: Notre Dame's ultimate two-year bar passage rate (capturing graduates who pass on a later attempt) reaches 99.01%, meaning almost the entire class of bar-takers eventually clears the exam even if a small number needed more than one sitting.
What explains the first-time gap? The data pack does not report a specific bar-prep curriculum, so any causal explanation beyond the numbers themselves would be speculation. What the pack does show is a class that enters with strong, consistent academic credentials — a 170 median LSAT and 3.89 median GPA — and those same credentials are generally correlated nationally with stronger bar outcomes, since the bar exam still rewards the reading, reasoning, and writing skills the LSAT and undergraduate GPA also measure. Beyond entering credentials, Notre Dame's curriculum emphasizes experiential and simulation-based learning at real scale: 325 simulation-course seats were filled, 204 clinic slots were filled, and 169 students filled field placements in the reporting year. None of this is presented in the pack as bar-specific preparation, but a curriculum this saturated with applied practice does mean graduates arrive at the bar exam with substantial hands-on exposure to legal reasoning and writing under real conditions, alongside their doctrinal coursework.
How the numbers should be read. An 89.44% first-time rate against an 81.6% comparison population is a meaningful, not marginal, edge — the kind of gap that matters if you're weighing Notre Dame against a school with a similar median LSAT but a less commanding bar record. The 99.01% ultimate rate is arguably the more reassuring number for an individual applicant, since it means that even among Notre Dame test-takers who didn't pass on the first attempt, nearly all eventually did within two years, which limits how much a single rough test day can derail a graduate's timeline into practice.
A general note on how bar exams work today (this part is not specific to Notre Dame): most jurisdictions, including states using the Uniform Bar Exam, are in the process of transitioning to the NCBE's NextGen bar exam, expected in many states around July 2028, and nearly every state separately requires the MPRE ethics exam regardless of which bar format is used. Applicants should verify the specific bar exam format and any state-added components (such as a state law course or pro bono requirement) for the jurisdiction where they intend to practice, since these rules are updated on their own timeline independent of any single school's pass-rate performance.
Notre Dame Law runs three named off-campus programs, and the London Programme is the flagship: founded in 1968, the pack identifies it as the only ABA-approved year-long study-abroad program offered by an American law school, meaning students can spend a full academic year rather than a single semester studying in London. That kind of duration is structurally different from the semester-abroad options common at other law schools, and it reflects Notre Dame's decades-long institutional investment in the program rather than a bolt-on partnership.
Notre Dame Law in Chicago, running since 2013, and Notre Dame Law in DC, running since 2015, are more recent additions built around specific professional markets. The DC program is a partnership with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, giving students a structured pathway into Washington practice with a direct firm connection built into the curriculum rather than left to informal networking. Chicago's program similarly places students in a major legal market away from the South Bend campus, and the school's history notes a long-standing Chicago tie: alumnus John F. Sandner funded the acquisition of the Chicago Bar Association Library collection back in 1990, underscoring that the Chicago relationship predates the formal 2013 program.
Beyond these three named programs, Notre Dame also maintains exchange arrangements with law schools in Chile, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, and Switzerland, giving students additional international options beyond the flagship London year. Taken together, these programs mean a Notre Dame student who wants a semester or year in a major legal market — London for international/comparative work, Chicago or DC for large-firm-market exposure — has an institutionally supported route to do it, rather than needing to arrange an ad hoc exchange. What the pack does not specify is enrollment capacity, cost differentials, or how credits transfer, so applicants weighing these programs against home-campus coursework should confirm those mechanics directly with the school.
Notre Dame Law's most visible alumni credential is the Supreme Court: the pack lists both Antonin Scalia and Amy Coney Barrett as graduates, and Barrett also appears among the school's notable faculty, having taught there before her judicial appointments. The alumni list also includes Barack Obama, giving the school a rare across-the-aisle pair of headline names, alongside Ann Claire Williams and Charles R. Wilson, and figures like Andrew Napolitano and Brian Moynihan, pointing to alumni presence in the judiciary, media, and corporate leadership rather than any single track.
On the faculty side, the roster reflects Notre Dame's particular strength in constitutional law, natural law, and law-and-religion scholarship, with names like John Finnis, Richard W. Garnett, Nicole Stelle Garnett, Gerard V. Bradley, O. Carter Snead, and M. Cathleen Kaveny appearing alongside historical figures like John T. Noonan Jr. and Charles E. Rice. The faculty roster also includes John Robert Blakey and Kenneth Francis Ripple, names that can matter for students seeking mentorship toward clerkships. The pack reports a 7-to-1 student-faculty ratio, which is tight enough to support the kind of individual faculty relationships that clerkship and academic placement typically depend on.
That faculty-clerkship pipeline shows up in the outcomes data: of 164 graduates, 28 landed federal clerkships and another 11 landed state or local clerkships, and the school is described in the pack as ranked #4 nationally for federal clerkship placement. That is a notably strong clerkship showing relative to class size — nearly one in six graduates went directly into a federal clerkship — and it lines up with a faculty that includes multiple current and former federal judges.
For applicants, the practical read is this: if your interest runs toward constitutional law, law and religion, or clerkship-track scholarship, Notre Dame's faculty list is unusually concentrated in exactly those areas, and its alumni network gives you both Supreme Court-level and non-legal executive touchpoints (Moynihan, for instance) that go beyond the traditional Big Law or judiciary tracks alone.
Notre Dame Law offers ten named clinics, and most students who want one get one: the pack reports 208 clinic spots available against 204 filled, essentially full utilization but with seats to spare. The roster spans criminal justice work (the Exoneration Justice Clinic), immigration, housing (the Eviction Clinic and Community Development Clinic), disability and veterans' law (Special Education Clinic, Veterans Law Clinic), international human rights (Global Human Rights Clinic), intellectual property, dispute resolution (Applied Mediation Clinic), and the distinctive Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic — a subject-matter fit with the school's broader law-and-religion faculty strength.
Beyond clinics, the school reports 169 filled field placements and 325 filled simulation-course seats, plus 25 co-curricular offerings. Combined with the clinic numbers, that points to a curriculum where experiential coursework is broadly available rather than a scarce, lottery-limited add-on — though the pack doesn't break down placement by practice area or specify how many students combine multiple experiential credits before graduation, so applicants with a specific clinic in mind (Exoneration Justice or Religious Liberty, for example) should confirm current seat availability and application timing directly with the school.
Notre Dame Law's published cost of attendance for a full-time JD student is $99,940, built from $73,430 in tuition, $520 in fees, and $25,990 in estimated living expenses for students living off campus. That sticker figure, however, is not what most admitted students actually pay.
Notre Dame reports that 92% of its JD students receive some form of grant aid, and the median grant among recipients is $30,000 per year. Applying that median grant to the tuition-and-fee line brings net tuition down to roughly $44,000, which — combined with the $25,990 living estimate — puts a typical grant recipient's net annual cost in the neighborhood of $70,000 rather than the full $99,940 sticker price. That is a meaningful gap, and it is the number worth anchoring on rather than the headline COA.
Grant sizes are not evenly distributed, though. The school's own banding shows that 54% of students receiving aid get a grant covering less than half of tuition, 31% get between half and full tuition, and only 4% land a full-tuition award. In practice, that means the median $30,000 figure describes the middle of the distribution — a meaningful discount, but well short of a full ride for most recipients. Roughly 8% of the class receives no grant at all and pays the full sticker cost.
A few things the pack does not let us say with confidence: Notre Dame's conditional-scholarship data (whether grants are tied to maintaining a certain GPA, and how many students actually lose a scholarship after 1L year) shows no entering or reduced counts reported in the most recent cycles, so applicants should verify directly with admissions whether awards are renewable-as-is or subject to academic conditions before assuming a grant is guaranteed for all three years.
For students weighing Notre Dame's Catholic, single-campus setting in Notre Dame, Indiana against other private law schools, the math above is the one to run for yourself: take the school's published median grant, apply it to the $73,430 tuition line, add the $25,990 living estimate, and compare that net number — not the $99,940 sticker — against your other offers. Because 92% of the class receives some grant, most admitted students should expect to negotiate or compare aid packages rather than assume they'll pay full freight, but the size of that discount varies widely depending on where an applicant's LSAT and GPA fall relative to the school's medians.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
There is no single LSAT score that guarantees anything at a school admitting roughly 16% of applicants — but you can locate yourself precisely on Notre Dame's own scale. The school's most recently reported LSAT range runs 166 at the 25th percentile, 170 at the median, and 171 at the 75th percentile, with GPAs of 3.78, 3.89, and 3.95 at the same three points. A 170 LSAT puts you exactly at the middle of Notre Dame's admitted class; a 171 or higher places you in the top quarter on that metric alone. A 166 sits at the bottom quarter, which does not disqualify an application but does mean the rest of the file — GPA, writing sample, letters, softs — is carrying more relative weight.
Because Notre Dame received 3,579 applications for roughly 575 offers in the most recent reported cycle, most applicants land somewhere in the middle of that LSAT band rather than clearly above or below it, which is exactly why framing your number against the 25th/50th/75th anchors — not against a vague sense of "good" or "bad" — is the useful exercise. A score below the 166 floor is not evidence of anything except that you are below where the middle 50% of the admitted class sat; it says nothing about your individual outcome.
The LSAT itself, as of the format in place since August 2024, consists of two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, plus an unscored variable section — Logic Games have been removed entirely. The separate Argumentative Writing sample is unscored but required and submitted online. Score changes of the magnitude that move an applicant from, say, a 25th-percentile to a median position at a school like Notre Dame typically come from sustained, multi-month preparation using official practice material rather than a single retake attempt. Schools consider your highest reported score, which is why many applicants treat an initial diagnostic as a starting point rather than a verdict.
GPA matters in tandem with the LSAT, not instead of it. Notre Dame's 3.89 median GPA sits well above most state-school averages, and the 3.78-3.95 band suggests the admissions committee is drawing from applicants with strong, consistent academic records across the board — so a below-median LSAT paired with a below-median GPA is a materially different application than a below-median LSAT paired with a 3.95. Neither combination should be read as predicting an outcome; it simply tells you which parts of your file are doing the heavier lifting. For a structured approach to moving your score toward Notre Dame's median or 75th-percentile anchors, see our guide at /how-to-study-for-the-lsat.
Applying to Notre Dame Law works best when you treat its Catholic identity and service orientation as a real evaluative lens, not a checkbox — the school explicitly frames legal education around law as vocation, and that framing should show up in how you write about why you want to attend, not just that you want to attend. Notre Dame is the oldest continuously operating Catholic law school in the country, and its mission emphasis is baked into features like its Loan Repayment Assistance Program for public-interest careers and a clinical roster that includes an Eviction Clinic, an Exoneration Justice Clinic, a Veterans Law Clinic, and a Religious Liberty Clinic — a personal statement or addendum that gestures at service, ethics, or a specific area of public-facing law tends to land better here than one written generically for a national target list.
Beyond mission fit, the numbers should shape your timeline strategy the way they would for any selective program: with roughly 3,579 applications competing for about 575 offers in the most recent cycle, the practical lesson is not about odds but about file quality and timing. Rolling or near-rolling admissions committees generally have more available seats and scholarship funds earlier in the cycle, so submitting a complete file — LSAT, transcripts, letters, personal statement — as early in the fall window as your best possible LSAT score allows is a stronger structural position than applying polished but late. Our general timeline breakdown at /law-school-application-timeline walks through how to sequence testing, recommendations, and drafts across an application cycle.
Because Notre Dame reports that 92% of its JD students receive some grant aid, with a median award of $30,000, it is also worth entering the process assuming aid will be part of the conversation rather than an afterthought. If you are admitted with a scholarship offer below what you expected relative to Notre Dame's own LSAT and GPA medians, or below a competing offer from a peer school, that is a legitimate point to raise with the admissions office — schools routinely reconsider awards when presented with comparable offers or clear positioning above their published medians. Our scholarship negotiation guide at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation covers how to make that case without overplaying your hand.
Finally, resist the temptation to treat a strong LSAT or GPA as a guarantee anywhere, including here. A 16% acceptance rate means the large majority of applicants — including many with numbers at or above Notre Dame's medians — do not receive offers, so the honest posture is to apply with a file that reflects genuine fit with the school's Catholic mission, service-oriented programming, and academic profile, while also applying broadly enough across a range of schools that your outcome does not hinge on a single admissions committee's read of your file.
Notre Dame Law's own numbers set the frame: total cost of attendance is estimated at $99,940 for a single year, built from $73,430 in tuition, $520 in fees, and $25,990 in off-campus living costs. Over three years, that is roughly $300,000 before interest — a number worth sitting with before you assume federal loans will cover it.
Here is the aid picture at Notre Dame specifically: 92% of students receive some grant, and the median grant among those who do is $30,000 — a little over 40% of tuition. But that median obscures a distribution that matters a lot to your bottom line. About 54% of students land in a smaller-award band (less than half tuition), 31% get a half-to-full-tuition award, and only 4% receive a full-tuition ride. In other words, most admitted students get something, but a full ride at Notre Dame is genuinely rare, and the largest group of grant recipients is working with a partial discount rather than a transformative one.
That matters for how you negotiate. If your LSAT and GPA sit at or above Notre Dame's medians (LSAT 170, GPA 3.89), you are in a stronger position to ask another school's written offer to be matched or to push your own offer upward — scholarship negotiation almost always starts from a competing offer in hand, not from asking a school to simply be generous. If you're below the 25th percentile (LSAT 166, GPA 3.78), don't expect a bigger number to appear just by asking; work the gap the other direction, by comparing net cost against schools where your numbers sit higher. The mechanics of how to structure that ask — what to say, when to send it, what leverage actually moves a committee — are covered in more general terms at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation; the Notre Dame-specific input to plug into that framework is the $30,000 median award and the four-band distribution above.
On the borrowing side, the ground has shifted for anyone financing law school starting in the 2026-27 cycle. Grad PLUS loans — which used to let students borrow up to the full cost of attendance — have been eliminated for new borrowers. In their place, the federal Direct Unsubsidized Loan caps borrowing at $50,000 per year and $200,000 in aggregate for law school, inside an overall $257,500 lifetime federal limit. Do that math against Notre Dame's own $99,940 annual estimate: a student borrowing the $50,000 annual federal loan maximum would reach only $150,000 after three years, well short of covering the roughly $300,000 three-year cost, leaving a gap that scholarships, savings, or private loans have to fill. (Verify these figures directly with a financial aid office, since the caps and the 8.07% rate cited for 2026-27 are recent policy changes and could be adjusted.)
Repayment options have narrowed too. New borrowers choose between a Tiered Standard Plan and the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP). The Standard Plan is the default and earns zero credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF); anyone planning to work toward forgiveness in a government or nonprofit job must actively opt into RAP. That distinction is worth flagging for Notre Dame applicants specifically, because the school's employment data shows a meaningful share of graduates going into government (12.2%) or public interest (4.3%) work, and Notre Dame maintains a Loan Repayment Assistance Program aimed at supporting graduates in those public-interest careers — a program to ask financial aid about directly if that's your intended path. For the general mechanics of how PSLF and RAP interact, see /law-school-loans-and-pslf; for cost-of-attendance planning across the whole application cycle, see /law-school-application-timeline.
There's no universal answer to whether a ~$99,940-a-year cost of attendance is "worth it" — the honest answer depends on what you're buying it for, and Notre Dame's own outcome data gives you the material to run that calculation yourself rather than take anyone's word for it.
Start with the employment reality. Among Notre Dame's graduating class of 164, 93.3% landed in jobs that were full-time, long-term, and either bar-required or JD-advantage — a strong outcome by any national standard. Of the graduates whose employment is categorized by firm size, 50 went to firms of 501-plus attorneys, which works out to roughly 30.5% of the class landing in the "Big Law" tier where the national salary distribution clusters around $215,000. That's the segment of the bimodal legal job market where a JD from a strong national program pays off most visibly and most quickly — high starting salaries, structured associate tracks, and (for those on that track) loan repayment that doesn't require PSLF at all, since a $215,000 salary services debt on a compressed timeline through direct repayment.
But Big Law isn't the only lens, and it isn't even the largest single outcome category in Notre Dame's data. Clerkships are a real strength here: 28 graduates went into federal clerkships and 11 into state or local clerkships from a class of 164 — a clerkship rate that, combined with Notre Dame's reported #4 national ranking for federal clerkship placement, suggests the school's investment pays off differently for students aiming at the judiciary rather than (or in addition to) a firm track. Government work (12.2%) and public interest (4.3%) round out a meaningful slice of the class, and it's for exactly this group that Notre Dame's Loan Repayment Assistance Program and the PSLF mechanics discussed elsewhere become directly relevant, rather than theoretical.
The bar-passage numbers are a useful sanity check on the degree's baseline value regardless of career track: Notre Dame's first-time bar passage rate of 89.44% sits well above the reported state average of 81.6%, and the two-year ultimate pass rate reaches 99.01%. Whatever your post-graduation path, the degree is very likely to convert into a license.
So who does the math favor? A candidate whose LSAT and GPA sit at or above Notre Dame's medians (170 / 3.89) is admitted into a class where roughly 30% end up in Big Law and a further meaningful share land federal or state clerkships — for that student, the ~$300,000 three-year price tag is being weighed against a realistic shot at a compensation tier that services the debt quickly, or against a credential (a federal clerkship) with long-term career value that's hard to price in dollars. A candidate more focused on government or public-interest law should weigh the cost differently: median grants around $30,000 and Notre Dame's own loan repayment assistance program narrow the gap, but the math depends on actually enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan like RAP rather than defaulting into the Standard Plan, which earns no PSLF credit at all.
What the pack does not let us say is anything about the median salary Notre Dame graduates earn outside Big Law, or precisely how the remaining employed graduates outside the 501+ firm tier are distributed across the salary curve — that data isn't broken out in the materials available here, so treat any assumption about the "typical" non-Big-Law salary as exactly that, an assumption, not a Notre Dame-specific fact. For a broader framework on how to weigh sticker cost against outcome data at any law school, see /is-law-school-worth-it; for how the LSAT score you're bringing to the table maps onto Notre Dame's own 25th/50th/75th percentiles, see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat.