Case Western Reserve University School of Law is one of eight schools at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. It was one of the first schools accredited by the American Bar Association. It is a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). It was initially named for Franklin Thomas Backus, a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, whose widow donated $50,000 to found the school in 1892. According to Case Western Reserve's official 2013 ABA-required disclosures, 58.6% of the Class of 2013 obtained full-time, long-term, bar passage-required employment nine months after graduation, excluding solo-practitioners. Academics The student-faculty ratio is 6.8:1. In August 2013, by a near-unanimous vote, the faculty adopted a new curriculum to reflect changes in the legal industry. The model is designed to blend practice, theory, and professionalism in all three years of law school. Students begin working with clients in the first year of law school. Writing and skills-oriented courses track course content to the school's substantive-law courses to blend theory and practice. Students also learn transactional drafting, financial literacy, and statutory and regulatory analysis during their first year. During the second year of law school, students specialize and continue to build on the skills they learned during their first year. The law school's concentrations include health care law, international law, national security law, and law, technology, and the arts. Beginning in 2016, a capstone semester became a hallmark of the third year. All students practice law full-time by working on cases through the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center at the law school or through an externship. Students may do externships in the U.S. or abroad. A select number of students may competitively apply to spend their third year in Europe, completing a foreign LLM degree in addition to their Case JD, at no additional cost. Students learn leadership through courses developed by faculty at Case Western's Weatherhead School of Management, and students graduate with e-portfolios of their work to share with employers. Rankings The school was ranked t78th by the U.S. News & World Report on its 2023 law school rankings. U.S. News & World Report has ranked its Health Care Law program ranked tied for 9th in the nation. In addition to its JD curriculum, the law school offers LLM and SJD degrees to foreign-trained lawyers. It also offers an Executive Master of Arts in Financial Integrity and a Masters in