The University of Wyoming College of Law is Wyoming's only law school, full stop — there is no other ABA-accredited (or any) law school anywhere in the state. That single fact shapes almost everything about the institution, from who applies to where its graduates end up practicing.
Founded in 1920, the College of Law has spent over a century as the exclusive pipeline into the Wyoming bench and bar. The roster of notable alumni reads like a directory of state government: multiple governors (Dave Freudenthal, Mike Sullivan, Matt Mead), a U.S. Senator (Alan Simpson), a former U.S. Senator and governor (John Hickey), several Wyoming Supreme Court justices (Marilyn Kite, Michael Golden, William U. Hill, E. James Burke, Barton Voigt), and federal appellate judges on the Tenth Circuit (Wade Brorby, Michael R. Murphy, Terrence L. O'Brien, Gregory A. Phillips). If you intend to practice law in Wyoming — especially in the public sector, on the bench, or in state politics — you are very likely to be sitting in classrooms and moot courtrooms alongside, or being taught by, people connected to that same network. The school's two moot court rooms, added in a 2009 expansion, are not just teaching tools: they have actually hosted oral arguments for the Wyoming Supreme Court and the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, putting students in the same physical space where real appellate law happens.
Being the only school in the state also shows up directly in the employment numbers. Wyoming reports 'WYOMING' as its largest single employment outcome category for graduates, and a full quarter of the most recent graduating class (16 of the total, or 25%) went into government positions — a proportion that reflects both the state's small legal market and the college's role as the default feeder into Wyoming's state agencies, attorney general's office, and judiciary. Bar passage data reinforces the same story: the college's home-state bar materials note that the majority of its graduates sit for the bar in Wyoming and Colorado, and its most recent first-time bar passage rate of 83.05% ran well above the overall state average of 76.01%, with an ultimate two-year passage rate of 86.96%. In a state with only one law school, the school's bar performance essentially is the state's bar performance for homegrown lawyers.
The monopoly position also means scale is modest by design, not by weakness. Total J.D. enrollment sits at 230 students, with about 64 degrees awarded in the most recent class — small enough that the college can offer a notably hands-on curriculum: 100 law clinic slots (91 filled), 96 field placements filled, and named concentrations spanning trial and appellate practice, business planning, estate planning, corporate and commercial law, administrative law, consumer law, international law, Indian law, health law, and education law.- Indian law and administrative law concentrations in particular reflect Wyoming's specific legal geography — tribal jurisdictions, federal land management, and energy regulation are simply a bigger part of practice here than in most states, and the curriculum is built around that reality rather than a generic national template.
There is a flip side worth naming plainly. Being the only law school in a low-population state means the applicant pool, the peer-student network, and the alumni base are geographically concentrated — the school does not currently report peer-school comparisons or a large roster of named centers and institutes beyond the George William Hopper Law Library (which holds over 206,000 items and Lexis/Westlaw access) and the Wyoming Law Review. Students drawn to Wyoming primarily for a large national brand-name alumni network in coastal legal markets, or for a big-city clinical and externship ecosystem, are choosing a fundamentally different kind of school than the one Wyoming actually is. What the University of Wyoming offers instead is depth of access to one specific state's legal, judicial, and political establishment — an advantage that is very large if your career plans point toward Wyoming, Rocky Mountain federal courts, or public service in the region, and much smaller if they do not.
Geographically, the college sits in Laramie at roughly 7,165 feet of elevation — the school markets this literally as 'Law at its Highest Point' — which is also a proxy for how remote and self-contained the legal community around the school is. There is no second law school across town offering a different specialty or a bigger firm-recruiting pipeline; for Wyoming residents and others planning a career centered on the state, this is the single on-ramp, and the alumni list above is the return on that concentration.
A 156 LSAT and a 3.55 GPA sit exactly at Wyoming's published medians, meaning half of the entering class scored above those marks and half below — that is the honest way to read these numbers, as planning anchors rather than as a probability of admission. The college received 483 applications and extended 173 offers for its most recent reported cycle, an acceptance rate of 35.82%, and enrolled a class of 74 full-time students (the college does not enroll part-time students).
The full reported range gives more texture than the median alone. The 25th percentile LSAT is 153 and the 75th percentile is 160 — a seven-point spread that is fairly wide, meaning the college is evaluating applicants across a real range of testing outcomes rather than clustering tightly around one number. GPA follows a similar pattern: 3.32 at the 25th percentile, 3.55 at the median, and 3.80 at the 75th percentile. An applicant whose numbers sit at or above the 75th percentile on both measures is positioned at the strong end of the class as reported; an applicant below the 25th percentile on both is positioned at the softer end — neither position guarantees or forecloses an outcome, since the pack does not report an admissions model, only the resulting class profile.
What those numbers should shape concretely is how you think about scholarship strategy, not admission odds. Wyoming reports that 89% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant among full-time recipients of $8,000. The distribution of award sizes is heavily weighted toward smaller awards: 55% of students receive aid covering less than half of tuition, 27% receive aid covering between half and full tuition, and 0% receive a full-tuition award. In practical terms, a large majority of funded students at Wyoming are getting partial, not full, scholarships — which makes it worth understanding exactly where your own LSAT and GPA fall relative to the 156/3.55 median before assuming a specific award size, and worth reading the general mechanics of how schools set scholarship bands around LSAT bands at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
Conditional scholarships are also worth a direct look before you sign anything, because Wyoming's own retention data shows real, if modest, year-to-year volatility. Of the 2022-23 entering cohort, 61 students held conditional scholarships and 7 (11.5%) had their awards reduced; for 2023-24, 80 entering students saw only 3 reductions (3.8%); and for the most recent 2024-25 cohort, 67 entering students saw 3 reductions (4.5%). That means in a typical recent year at Wyoming, the large majority of conditionally-scholarshiped students have kept their aid, but the 2022-23 cohort's double-digit reduction rate is a reminder that the risk is not zero. Anyone offered a conditional scholarship at Wyoming should ask admissions directly what GPA or class-rank benchmark preserves the award, since that condition — not the initial dollar figure — is what determines your real cost of attendance in years two and three.
At Wyoming, a conditional scholarship is less risky than the reputation these awards carry nationally. The school's own ABA-reported retention data show that in the three most recent cohorts, the share of students who had a scholarship reduced after 1L year ranged from 3.8% to 11.5% — meaning at least 88 of every 100 conditional-scholarship holders kept their award at its original level.
The numbers by year: of 61 entering scholarship recipients in 2022-23, 7 (11.5%) had awards reduced; of 80 in 2023-24, only 3 (3.8%) did; and of 67 in 2024-25, again just 3 (4.5%) did. The trend line is toward fewer reductions, not more, and even the worst of the three years kept the reduction rate under 12%.
Scholarships are also broadly distributed rather than concentrated at the top of the class: 89% of students receive some grant aid, with a median first-year grant of $8,000. Of students who get aid, the largest band (55%) receives less than half of tuition, 27% receive between half and full tuition, and nobody in the reporting cohort received a full-tuition award — so most Wyoming scholarships are partial, and most partial awards survive the first year intact.
The pack does not publish the specific GPA threshold Wyoming attaches to scholarship renewal, so applicants negotiating an offer should ask the admissions office directly what floor applies to their award and confirm it in writing before enrolling — a detail generic to conditional scholarships everywhere, not unique to Wyoming (see the shared scholarship-negotiation guide for how to have that conversation). What Wyoming's own data does establish is the base rate you're working from: historically, roughly 90% or more of conditional-scholarship recipients here have kept their money past 1L year, which is a materially better retention record than the horror-story conditional-scholarship programs sometimes described in law school admissions discourse.
Wyoming's graduates passed the bar on their first attempt at an 83.05% rate, versus a 76.01% statewide average for all takers in that cycle — a gap of just over 7 percentage points. Looked at over two years, the school's ultimate pass rate climbs to 86.96%, meaning most graduates who don't clear the bar on the first try do clear it on a second.
Part of the explanation is structural: the College of Law is the only law school in Wyoming, so its curriculum, its bar-prep advising, and its relationships with the state's courts are built around the exact jurisdiction most of its graduates will sit for. The school's moot court rooms have hosted actual oral arguments before the Wyoming Supreme Court and the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which signals how tightly the school's practical training is tied to the bench and bar its graduates will face.
Employment outcomes reinforce that read: "Wyoming" is reported as the largest single employment destination for graduates, and a combined 25% of the class goes into government work with another 12.5% into public interest — categories that typically require bar passage in-state fairly quickly after graduation, which puts real pressure on first-time pass rates and on the school to prepare students well for exactly that test. Overall, 85.9% of graduates land in jobs that are bar-required or JD-advantage roles within the reporting window, a figure that only holds up if bar passage itself is reliably high.
A caution on comparing across years: an older figure cited for the Class of 2017 put the school's first-time pass rate at 74.17%, with the majority of that cohort's graduates sitting for the bar in Wyoming and Colorado — a different testing cohort, different states, and a different rule set than the current 83.05%-vs-76.01% comparison. The two data points aren't apples-to-apples, so prospective students should treat the current gap as the more relevant planning figure and understand that bar-passage rates can move meaningfully from year to year at any single-state-serving school this size, where a class of roughly 64 graduates means a handful of results can shift the percentage noticeably.
Wyoming does not place graduates into the 501+-attorney firms that dominate Big Law recruiting — the pack's employment data shows zero graduates in that category. What it delivers instead is a strong, geographically concentrated pipeline into government work, small and mid-sized firms, and judicial clerkships, backed by a bar-passage rate that beats the state average by a wide margin.
Of the 64 graduates in the reporting class, 85.9% landed in jobs that were full-time, long-term, and either bar-passage-required or JD-advantage — a solid outcome for a small, regionally focused program. Government work is the single largest sector: 16 graduates (25%) went into government jobs, more than any private-sector category. Private practice sorted almost entirely into smaller firms: 17 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 5 to firms of 11-25, 2 to firms of 26-50, and 3 to firms in the 101-250 range. No graduates reported landing at firms of 51-100 or 251-500 attorneys, and none at the 501+ Big Law tier. Public interest work absorbed 8 graduates (12.5%), and 2 went into business and industry roles. Clerkships added 2 federal and 1 state/local clerkship to the mix — a meaningful number of judicial credentials for a class this size.
The pack flags 'WYOMING' as the largest single employment category by location, which tells you what the numbers already suggest: this is a school whose graduates overwhelmingly build careers inside the state, working for state agencies, the Attorney General's office, local firms, and Wyoming courts, rather than dispersing into national legal markets.
A graduate can't take a bar-required job without passing the bar, and Wyoming's first-time pass rate of 83.05% sits well above the state's overall first-time average of 76.01% for the same cycle. Over a two-year window, the school's ultimate pass rate climbs to 86.96%. That gap between the school's numbers and the statewide average is a genuine differentiator: in a state with only one law school, the statewide average is effectively driven by Wyoming's own graduates plus out-of-state transfers sitting the Wyoming bar, so outperforming it signals the College of Law's bar-prep pipeline is doing real work rather than simply riding demographic advantage.
The school reports high utilization of its experiential offerings: all 100 clinic slots available were filled at a 91% rate, field placements filled 96 slots, and simulation courses filled 150 slots, alongside five co-curricular offerings. For a class of roughly 74 entering students, that volume of clinical and field-placement capacity means most students who want hands-on experience — appearing in state agency proceedings, working in a legal aid setting, or handling simulated litigation — can get it before they ever sit the bar. That kind of exposure lines up naturally with the eventual employment mix: government and smaller-firm practice tend to reward exactly the kind of practical, generalist skill set clinics and field placements build, more than the specialized transactional training that feeds Big Law recruiting.
No — the data is unambiguous on this point. Zero graduates in the reporting year went to firms of 501 or more attorneys, and the firm-size distribution tops out at the 101-250 band with only 3 graduates. Applicants targeting a coastal or major-market Big Law career should treat Wyoming as the wrong on-ramp for that specific goal. But for applicants who want to practice law in Wyoming — in state government, in a local firm, in public interest work, or in a clerkship with a state or federal judge — the outcomes data suggests the school delivers reliably on exactly that promise, with a bar-passage advantage that removes one of the biggest risks to ever using the degree at all.
The 25% government placement rate, combined with 12.5% in public interest and a near-total absence from mid-size and large private practice, tells a consistent story: Wyoming Law is built around producing lawyers for a small, resource-constrained state legal market rather than a national one. That's neither better nor worse in the abstract — it depends entirely on whether an applicant's career goal is to practice in Wyoming or a similar market. Given the school's cost structure and grant availability discussed elsewhere in this guide, that regional focus is also the most realistic lens for weighing return on investment: the relevant comparison is state-government and small-firm Wyoming salaries, not the six-figure Big Law benchmark that drives national law school marketing.
Wyoming's outsized political and judicial alumni roster isn't an accident of marketing — it's a structural consequence of being the only law school in a small state since 1920. When there is exactly one law school serving an entire state's bar, government, and bench, that school's graduates become the default supply of the state's lawyers, legislators, judges, and executives, generation after generation.
Three Wyoming governors hold degrees from the College of Law: Dave Freudenthal (J.D. 1980), the 31st Governor; Mike Sullivan (J.D. 1964), the 29th Governor and later U.S. Ambassador to Ireland; and Matt Mead (J.D. 1987), the 32nd Governor. On the federal side, the school's alumni list includes two U.S. Senators from Wyoming — John Hickey (LL.B. 1934), who was also the state's 24th Governor and later a Tenth Circuit judge, and Alan Simpson (J.D. 1958). Ken Buck (J.D. 1985) represented Colorado's 4th District in the U.S. House, and James G. Watt (J.D. 1962) served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior. That's a concentration of statewide and national executive/legislative leadership produced by a program graduating a class of roughly 64 students in its most recent reporting year.
Deeper than the governor and senator list alone suggests. At the state level, at least five Wyoming Supreme Court justices are Wyoming Law graduates: E. James Burke (J.D. 1977), Michael Golden (J.D. 1967), William U. Hill (J.D. 1974, a former Chief Justice), Marilyn Kite (J.D. 1974), and Barton Voigt (J.D. 1979, also a former Chief Justice). At the federal level, the alumni list includes five judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit — James E. Barrett (J.D. 1949), Wade Brorby (J.D. 1958), Michael R. Murphy (J.D. 1972), Terrence L. O'Brien, and Gregory A. Phillips — plus Alan B. Johnson (J.D. 1964) on the U.S. District Court for Wyoming. Put together, that's a bench presence spanning the state's highest court and the regional federal appellate court that covers Wyoming, built almost entirely from one school's graduating classes over roughly six decades.
The pack's current clerkship data suggests the pipeline hasn't gone quiet: recent graduating classes still place clerks directly into federal (2) and state/local (1) judgeships. And the physical infrastructure backs up the connection — the school's moot court rooms, added in a 2009 expansion, have been used by the actual Wyoming Supreme Court and the actual U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to hear real oral arguments, not just student exercises. That's a rare, tangible link between a law school building and the courts its graduates go on to sit on.
Because the arithmetic of a one-law-school state compounds over a century. Founded in 1920, the College of Law has been the exclusive in-state source of new Wyoming lawyers for over 100 years. Every state legislator, agency lawyer, judge, or governor who wanted a Wyoming legal credential without leaving the state got it here — alumni on the list include state representatives and senators such as James L. Applegate, Oscar A. Hall, Bob Nicholas, Charles Pelkey, and Robert H. Johnson, alongside the higher-profile governors and justices. Combine that near-monopoly on in-state legal education with a legal market small enough that a handful of graduates each decade can plausibly reach its highest offices in a state served by only one law school.
If a career in Wyoming's state government, judiciary, or elected office is the ambition, this pipeline is a real, documented asset — not folklore. The path from Laramie classroom to a state agency desk, a legislative seat, a Tenth Circuit clerkship, or eventually the Wyoming Supreme Court has been walked by dozens of named graduates across a century. That same concentration, though, is regionally specific: the roster is built almost entirely around Wyoming and the Tenth Circuit's federal footprint, so an applicant whose goal is political or judicial leadership in a different state should read this alumni strength as evidence of what the school does exceptionally well in its market, not as a transferable guarantee elsewhere.
Wyoming's own reporting shows a curriculum built around doing legal work, not just reading about it. The college reports 100 clinic seats available in a given cycle, with 91 of those seats actually filled by students — a fill rate that suggests clinical work is in real demand relative to capacity, not an underused option padding a catalog. Field placements, where students work under supervision at outside offices, filled 96 slots, and simulation courses — the practice-based classes built around mock transactions, negotiations, or trials rather than live clients — filled 150 slots, by far the largest category. On top of that, the school lists five co-curricular offerings, the competition and skills-building programs (moot court, trial team, and similar activities) that run alongside the regular course load.
The pack does not name individual clinics, so prospective students should confirm current clinic subject areas directly with the college rather than assume a particular practice area is covered. What is verifiable is the breadth of doctrinal concentrations the school lists: trial and appellate practice, business planning, estate planning, corporate and commercial law, administrative law, consumer law, international law, Indian law, health law, and education law. That spread signals a curriculum designed to let a small student body — 74 in the entering class, 230 total J.D. enrollment — sample a wide range of practice settings rather than specialize narrowly.
One feature stands out as genuinely distinctive rather than generic marketing language: Wyoming's moot court rooms, added in a 2009 expansion, have actually been used by the Wyoming Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to hear real oral arguments. For a student aiming at a Wyoming or Tenth Circuit clerkship — the pack shows 2 federal and 1 state/local clerkship among recent graduates — training in a room that has literally hosted those courts is a tangible, verifiable link between the classroom and the bench.
Students also have access to the George William Hopper Law Library, which holds roughly 206,000 items along with Lexis and Westlaw access, and the school publishes the Wyoming Law Review as its scholarly journal. Between the clinic and field placement numbers, the simulation course volume, and courtroom access most schools cannot replicate, the pack supports a picture of an experiential program that is small in absolute numbers — matching the size of the class — but proportionally substantial.
The right way to read an LSAT score at Wyoming is against its own published band, not against a national curve. Wyoming's entering class shows a 25th/50th/75th LSAT split of 153/156/160, alongside a GPA split of 3.32/3.55/3.80. A 156 sits at this class's midpoint; a 160 places an applicant in the top quarter of the seated class on the LSAT alone. Those numbers matter more than the raw acceptance rate might suggest — with 483 applications producing 173 offers (a 35.82% offer rate) for a class of only 74, seats are scarce in absolute terms even though the LSAT band is moderate compared to national elite schools.
Since August 2024, the LSAT itself has consisted of two scored Logical Reasoning sections, one scored Reading Comprehension section, and an unscored variable section — Logic Games are gone, and Argumentative Writing is now a separate, unscored, online-proctored writing sample submitted apart from the multiple-choice exam. Most applicants who move their score meaningfully do so over months of preparation using official practice material, and schools consider an applicant's single highest score, so a retake after focused prep is a normal part of the process rather than a red flag. For structured prep guidance, see the shared LSAT study guide (/how-to-study-for-the-lsat).
For Wyoming specifically, the LSAT number an applicant brings is tied directly to cost. The pack shows 89% of students receiving some grant aid, with a median grant of $8,000 — but the aid is uneven: 55% of students land in a band covering less than half of tuition, 27% land between half and full tuition, and 0% receive a full-tuition award. Because scholarship bands at most schools track LSAT and GPA against the school's own medians, an applicant sitting above the 156/3.55 midpoints is generally in a stronger position to negotiate for one of the larger awards than one below it — though no school publishes a formula, and Wyoming's data pack does not provide one either. It is also worth knowing that scholarships tied to GPA benchmarks can be reduced: Wyoming's own conditional-scholarship data shows between roughly 4% and 11.5% of an entering cohort losing part of their award in a given year across the three most recent cycles reported. That is a real, recurring event, not a hypothetical, and it argues for treating a first-year scholarship offer as conditional rather than guaranteed for all three years.
The practical takeaway: treat your LSAT score as a positioning tool against Wyoming's 153-160 band, not as a probability of admission — no honest source can tell you your odds — and understand that where you land in that band likely shapes the size and durability of any grant offer more than it shapes whether you get an offer at all.
Applying to Wyoming follows the same basic mechanics as any ABA-accredited J.D. program: an LSAC account, a Credential Assembly Service (CAS) report compiling transcripts and letters of recommendation, a personal statement, and an online application submitted through LSAC. The data pack for Wyoming does not list a specific application deadline or application fee, so applicants should confirm both directly on the college's admissions page or through LSAC rather than assume a date — deadlines and fees change cycle to cycle and are exactly the kind of detail worth double-checking close to the time you apply.
Most law schools, Wyoming included based on its modest class size of 74 seated from 483 applications, admit on a rolling basis, meaning files are reviewed and decided as they come in rather than all at once after a single deadline. Under a rolling system, applying earlier in the cycle — typically once fall grades and a finished personal statement are ready — generally means a larger pool of remaining seats and scholarship funds, since 89% of Wyoming's class receives some grant aid and grant budgets can tighten as a cycle progresses. For a full walk-through of the application calendar, letters of recommendation, and how rolling admissions actually plays out month by month, see the shared timeline guide (/law-school-application-timeline).
Because Wyoming is the state's only law school, applicants weighing it against other regional options should also plan around its specific bar-exam and career geography rather than generic national timing — but that is a separate question from the mechanics of the application itself.
Financing a JD at the University of Wyoming starts from a different baseline than at most law schools: the data pack does not report a usable tuition figure (it lists $0, which almost certainly reflects a reporting gap rather than free tuition), so any specific tuition number you see elsewhere should be verified directly with the school before you build a budget. What the pack does show clearly is the non-tuition side of the ledger and the school's grant behavior, and those numbers are worth anchoring on.
Eighty-nine percent of students receive some grant aid, with a median award of $8,000 per year. That grant is not distributed evenly: 55% of aided students get less than half of tuition covered, 27% get between half and full tuition, and nobody in the pack's cohort receives a full-tuition award. Practically, this means a Wyoming scholarship offer should be read as a meaningful discount for most admits, but rarely a free ride — plan for real out-of-pocket cost even with an award. Wyoming's median LSAT (156) and median GPA (3.55) are the natural reference points: a file above those medians is the kind of file schools generally use grant money to recruit, so if your numbers sit at or above the 156/3.55 mark, it is reasonable to ask whether your initial offer reflects that, using the negotiation approach described at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
A second thing to check before you accept any offer: whether it is conditional on maintaining a GPA floor after 1L year. The pack's retention data shows that scholarship reductions do happen — 11.5% of the 2022-23 entering class lost part of their award, versus 3.8%–4.5% in the two most recent reported years. That's a real, non-trivial risk in a curve-graded first year, and it means you should ask the admissions office in writing exactly what GPA a conditional scholarship requires and what percentage of a recent class kept versus lost theirs.
On the cost-of-living side, the pack estimates $17,600 a year for an off-campus student, which — combined with Laramie's rural, low-cost setting — is a genuinely modest number by national law-school standards. That matters because of how federal financing now works: as of the 2025-26 cycle, Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, and the Direct Unsubsidized Loan is capped at $50,000 a year for professional students (verify current figures before you rely on them). At many law schools that cap forces a scramble for private loans to cover a large tuition-driven gap. At a school with Wyoming's apparent cost structure, a $50,000 federal annual cap is far more likely to actually cover tuition plus living costs, which reduces — though does not eliminate — the need for private borrowing.
Repayment strategy should follow from where Wyoming graduates actually work, not from a generic plan. If you go into a 501(c)(3) or government role, the loan federal rules require you to affirmatively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) to bank progress toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness — the default Standard Plan earns zero PSLF credit. Given that roughly a quarter of Wyoming's reporting graduates go into government work (see the outcomes section for the exact figures), that RAP-versus-Standard choice is not an abstraction here; it is the kind of decision a meaningful share of each class actually faces. Read /law-school-loans-and-pslf before you sign a promissory note, and build your three-year budget around confirmed tuition and fee figures from the school rather than any estimate.
Wyoming Law is worth it primarily for applicants who want to practice law in Wyoming or the surrounding Mountain West, who are comfortable with a small, regional legal market rather than a national Big Law track, and who can attend at a genuinely low cost. It is a harder case for anyone whose primary goal is a large-firm associate job, since the school's own outcomes data reports zero graduates placed at firms of 501 or more attorneys.
The case for attending. Wyoming is the only law school in the state, and its outcomes data reflects a tight, durable pipeline into that market: the largest reported employment category for graduates is Wyoming itself, roughly a quarter of the class goes into government work, and another 12.5% goes into public-interest roles. The alumni list backs this up in a way few regional schools can match — multiple Wyoming governors, U.S. senators, Tenth Circuit judges, and Wyoming Supreme Court justices are graduates, which signals that a Wyoming JD is a well-understood, respected credential inside the state's bench, bar, and government. The school's moot courtrooms have hosted actual oral arguments from the Wyoming Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit, a concrete sign of how embedded the school is in the state's legal infrastructure. Bar outcomes reinforce the local-market thesis: Wyoming's first-time bar pass rate of 83.05% ran well above the state average of 76.01%, and the two-year ultimate pass rate reached 86.96% — strong numbers for anyone planning to practice in-state.
Employment overall looks solid for a class this size: 85.9% of graduates landed in jobs that are full-time, long-term, and either bar-required or JD-advantage, out of 64 total graduates. Clerkship placement — 2 federal and 1 state/local clerkship reported — is meaningful for a class this small, and a genuine option for students who build the credentials for it. The firm-size data shows most employed graduates land at small firms (the 1-10 attorney band is the largest single firm-size category, followed by 11-25 and a handful in the 101-250 range) — consistent with a state whose legal market is dominated by small and mid-size practices rather than large firms.
The case for looking elsewhere. If your goal is Big Law, a national firm track, or a large-city legal market outside the Mountain West, Wyoming's own data does not support that path: it reports zero placements at 501+ attorney firms and no placements in the 51-100 or 251-500 bands either. Its U.S. News rank of 112 (2026-27) also means it will not carry the same door-opening weight outside the region that it carries inside Wyoming, Colorado, and neighboring states. Applicants whose LSAT and GPA sit meaningfully above Wyoming's medians (156 LSAT / 3.55 GPA) and who want national mobility should weigh whether a higher-ranked school with stronger non-regional outcomes, even at higher sticker cost, better serves their goals — that trade-off is the core question addressed at /is-law-school-worth-it.
The cost-risk lens. Because the pack's tuition figures are not reliably reported, a firm cost verdict isn't possible here — confirm current tuition and total cost of attendance directly with the school before deciding. What is clear is that 89% of students receive some grant aid (median $8,000), that more than half of aided students still cover more than half of tuition themselves, and that conditional scholarships tied to GPA benchmarks carry a real risk of reduction — 11.5% of one recent entering class lost part of their award after 1L grades came in, though more recent years show lower reduction rates near 4%. Anyone accepting a conditional scholarship should get the exact retention GPA in writing and understand it's a live risk, not a formality.
Bottom line. Wyoming Law makes the most sense for a specific applicant: someone rooted in or committed to practicing in Wyoming or a nearby Mountain West state, drawn to government, public-interest, small-firm, or judicial-clerkship work rather than Big Law, and able to attend at a cost that a low-cost-of-living regional public school with high grant incidence is likely (though not guaranteed by this pack) to offer. It is a weaker fit for an applicant chasing national firm placement, a top-50 brand name, or a legal market far from the Rockies. For the right applicant, though, the combination of an unusually strong in-state alumni network, above-average bar passage, and a firmly regional placement record makes the degree do exactly what it is built to do.