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Georgetown University Law Center

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Georgetown University Law Center, or GULC, is a branch of Georgetown University in Washington, DC. It is frequently ranked among the top law schools in the United States, and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The Dean of the Law Center is T. Alexander Aleinikoff.

Opened as Georgetown Law School in 1870, it was the first law school run by a Jesuit institution within the U.S. GULC has been separate from the main Georgetown campus (in the neighborhood of Georgetown) since 1890, when it moved near Chinatown. The GULC campus is currently located on New Jersey Ave, several blocks north of the Capitol, and a few blocks due west of Union Station. The campus is composed of the classroom building of McDonough Hall, the Williams Law Library, the Gewirz Student Center, which provides housing to mostly first year law students, and the Hotung International Law Center, as well as a separate building housing a sports and fitness center.

Among the GULC faculty are former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, and former U.S. Congressman Father Robert Drinan, as well as many former Supreme Court clerks and other notable legal academics and professionals.

For more than a decade, the Law Center barred U.S. military recruiters from participating in on-campus interviews or solicitations of students for employment. The AALS considered the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy an impermissible discrimination against homosexuals, and required its members to forbid access to any employer not meeting its equal opportunity standards. With the congressional passage of the multiple "Solomon Amendments" to the National Defense Authorization Act, GULC was barred from receiving federal funding (though not individual students from receiving federal financial aid) for its denial of access to the military. The law school was originally willing to take this loss to stand up against the hiring policy. However, the government reinterpreted the law to block federal funding not just to noncompliant law schools, but to their entire parent university. GULC relented and reopened its doors to the military, particularly due to the severe impact that the loss of federal funding would have on the Georgetown University Hospital and medical school. The Law Center has continued to protest the military's policy and has supported litigation challenging this application of the Solomon Amendments as violative of the First Amendment.

Famous Alumni

President Lyndon Johnson also attended classes at the Law Center for a few months in 1934, but did not graduate.

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