As a student in the General LL.M. program, you'll create a one-year degree program around your particular research interest. If you're a lawyer educated outside the United States and want to use the LL.M. to qualify to sit for the New York Bar Examination, we encourage you to pursue a specially designed General LL.M. Professional program. We'll take into consideration your familiarity with other legal jurisdictions, and do our best to facilitate your transition into the U.S. legal system.

The Criminal Law LL.M. is one of the only post-professional programs in the United States devoted exclusively to the study of criminal law. In this unique program, you'll create an individual program of study in U.S., international and comparative criminal law.

In either program, you can choose to write a more extended piece of scholarly work under the guidance of a professor.

Here at SUNY Buffalo Law School, you get:

• Individual attention right from the start
• Become a part of a tight-knit group
• An opportunity to develop your career
• Invaluable real-world experience
• A global university on an international border
• Work with highly qualified faculty

Your goals as a student in our LL.M. program are as individual as you are. Once you're accepted into the program, you'll talk with the director of post-professional and international education, and then draft an Individual Program Statement, or IPS. The IPS sets out your goals for the academic program and for your career, identifies strengths and weaknesses in your legal training, and lists the courses you'll take. The IPS is a road map for reaching your goals, and it can be revised during the academic year.

Our LL.M. students find themselves in a select program that's part of a large and intellectually diverse law school. Everyone at the Law School is committed to helping you connect with professors, private practitioners, public officials at the local, county, state and federal levels, and advocates working in non-governmental organizations. And you'll be encouraged to explore the many ways in which the law school connects to other departments and disciplines in the university as well as professional organizations, public offices and private firms.

Through SUNY Buffalo Law's Career Services Office, students have direct access to prestigious employers across the United States. Employers take part in recruiting and mentoring programs that include on-campus interviews and off-campus interviews in places like New York City and Washington, D.C. More than half of our new lawyers accept positions outside Western New York.

Externships and judicial clerkships provide our students with unique legal and public-service experience. You can work in a variety of government and non-profit organizations, and get academic credit for that work. At the externship host offices, you'll learn how to work with a client and address the client's specific needs and goals – something that's hard to teach in a classroom.

Our students also help judges, attorneys and legislators with pressing legal questions that arise in cases; help develop public policy and legislation; and respond to citizens' inquiries or problems. You may, for example, attend court, draft an opinion for a judge or write legislation for a member of Congress.

Just minutes from Canada, UB is proud of its international character. UB ranks among the top five public research universities and 17th among all American colleges and universities in international enrollment. Our LL.M. programs have attracted candidates from Albania, Austria, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Hungary, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Kosovo, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Venezuela.

The Ph.D. is not a requirement for teaching at law schools in the United States. However, at SUNY Buffalo Law School over one-fourth of our tenured or tenure-track faculty have Ph.D. degrees from top-ranking American universities in a wide variety of social science disciplines, including anthropology, economics, history, political science, psychology and sociology. On our faculty you will find founding members of contemporary approaches to legal education and analysis, including but not limited to the Law and Society movement and the Critical Legal Studies movement. These innovative pedagogical approaches to the substance and the interpretation of law provide our students with an extraordinarily rich intellectual experience.