There is this question that I've been ruminating on for the past few days and i was hoping if you could help me out. It is whether law schools take into consideration geographical location in the admissions process? Specifically students from Africa.
That is an excellent question.
Indeed, law schools in the United States all value geographic diversity, and they go to some lengths to make sure that their incoming class doesn’t all hail from the same places and the same undergraduate institutions.
There are two important caveats:
1. Public law schools (meaning, state law schools, like University of California and University of Michigan and University of Texas) often have to follow state laws that require them to give some level of preference to in-state residents. Those rules vary from state to state, and residency preferences are more significant in some states than in others. There is no single, uniform policy across the United States.
2. The legal profession is a cartel (a legal one). Meaning, in order to practice law in the state of New York, you must be licensed in the state of New York. If you want to practice in Germany, you must be licensed in Germany. If you want to practice in Nigeria, you must be licensed in Nigeria. And those licensing procedures often require you to have a law degree from that particular country, in that particular legal system.
There are some treaties that permit crossover from one country to another. For example, South Korea and India have special rules that permit some lawyers to practice in their countries with US JD degrees. That is not the norm for most countries and jurisdictions, though.
So if you plan on practicing in your home country after law school in the United States, you need to investigate what the local licensing requirements are. It is very possible that a JD from a US law school will not qualify you to sit for their equivalent of the bar, and that’s not something you want to discover after you’ve spent the time and the money on a US JD.
And admissions officers know that it’s not a foregone conclusion that you can practice outside the US after attending their law school. So in your application, you need to make clear how a US JD will fit into your goals and that those goals will be viable with that degree. They don’t want to admit people who won’t be able to practice law wherever it is that they want to end up. The burden is on you to show in your application that you have thought it through and also that you have contingency plans. If you assume you’ll be practicing in the US after you get your JD, what is your backup plan if you can’t get a work visa to stay, for example?
Another possibility: It is common for big, international law firms to have offices in multiple countries, and in that case, it’s sometimes possible to practice in another country with a US JD as long as you’re under the supervision of a lawyer at that firm who is licensed to practice in that country.
That’s all by way of saying: it can get complicated. Do not assume that your US JD would automatically be recognized in your home country, or that you’d automatically be able to practice in the US if you don’t have citizenship or a green card.
What is more common is for people from outside the US to get their law degrees in their home countries, and then come to the United States for a one-year LLM degree designed for foreign-trained lawyers. That is another option to explore.