Brooklyn Law School Earns an A+ for Business Law in preLaw

Brooklyn Law School was given an A+ on a pre Law Magazine’s “Business Law Honor Roll,” a newly published ranking that reflects the school’s expansive curricular offerings, including its specialized business law classes, clinics, centers, and externships.  

The ranking is 30 percent based on the school’s concentration in business law, with clinics and centers also a large consideration, accounting for 24 percent and 12 percent of the overall grade, respectively.   

In addition to the school’s award-winning Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic (BLIP Clinic), established in 2008 and led by Professor Jonathan Askin, the school continues to innovate in the clinical space, with the launch of the Community Development & Movement Infrastructure Clinic (CD-MIC) in the fall of 2024.  The preLaw article accompanying the ranking specifically called out CD-MIC’s mission.  

Assistant Professor and CD-MIC Director Michael Haber explained that the Law School’s business law students learn about the field of business law in numerous contexts, from the largest multinationals to small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits.  

“This ranking recognizes the breadth of BLS's offerings in the classroom, as well as our clinical offerings, including BLIP, which focuses its efforts on emerging technology-driven start-ups, and the CD-MIC that I lead, which provides students with the opportunity to get hands-on experience with the kinds of sophisticated business law matters routinely handled by major firms—but in a mostly-nonprofit, public interest context,” Haber said. “Although our clients have orders of magnitude less in their bank accounts than large businesses, the processes of identifying risk, managing compliance, doing diligence, and navigating regulatory uncertainty have fundamental commonalities across different sizes and types of entities, and the lessons learned in our clinics are transferable to a wide variety of business law practices.” 

Students also gain practical knowledge through the Law School’s centers, including the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law, which was founded in 1987 and renamed in 2007 for Dennis J. Block ’67, a Trustee Emeritus of the school’s Board of Trustees.  

The Block Center helps to shape international business law and policy through a rich variety of programs that bring leading scholars to campus to address the critical issues in the field. Its premier fellowship program further enriches the educational experience of students interested in careers in international business law. 

“The International Business Law Fellowship provides students with transformative opportunities to engage with leading scholars, practitioners, and policy experts who work at the intersection of international and economic law,” said Irene Ten Cate, Associate Professor of Legal Writing and Co-Director of the Block Center. 

The rankings are also based on externships related to business law, such as the school’s New York Civil Court Consumer Law Externship, journals including the Journal of Law and Policy and the Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial and Commercial Law, as well as the school’s many student organizations that focus on business law. 

The new ranking was picked up in Above the Law.