Who We Are
Lawyers from all over the world come to The University of Texas at Austin to expand the breadth and depth of their legal knowledge and invest in an internationally recognized Master of Laws. The LL.M. Program is diverse, selective, and small, with a maximum of 50 spots for each incoming class. LL.M. students from foreign countries and the U.S. are fully integrated into the academic life of the Law School, learning side by side with 880 J.D. students. The LL.M. class is global in reach, with students from 19 different countries in the Class of 2022, including 4 Fulbright students. In fact, The University of Texas at Austin is home to over 5,000 international students, and the rich diversity on our campus is essential to our success as a global learning community.
What We’re Fundraising For
The University of Texas School of Law champions ideas and programs that have the power to change the world. The LL.M. Program helps us maintain our status as a world-class law school and is an opportunity for your immediate investment in The University of Texas School of Law. The LL.M. Program established the Mary Mikeska LL.M. Scholarship in 2013 in honor of Mary Mikeska, a former longtime program coordinator of the LL.M. Program. Contributions to the Mary Mikeska LL.M. Scholarship enable the LL.M. Program to bring the best students to Texas, enriching their lives and nurturing their development as future leaders while benefiting those students who face the prospect of serious loan debt. Today public funding has been reduced to less than 12% of our budget. Our tuition is still lower than that of the other leading law schools, and U.S. News and World Report recently said that we continue to provide a better return on investment than any other top law school in the country. We nevertheless compete fiercely with rival schools for the best students. We can no longer rely on low tuition to win those battles. They must be won with scholarship support for the ablest applicants.
Your Impact
These scholarships will help us win head-to-head battles with our competitors for the most talented applicants and will ensure that Texas Law remains the provider of our finest lawyers, judges, political leaders, and public servants for decades to come. The success of this campaign will help us establish ourselves as the premier public law school in America. We’re changing the world, and your support of the Mary Mikeska LL.M. Scholarship helps makes that possible. Give now. Every gift matters.
"Eleven months have passed since I started this academic endeavor, and the knowledge learned and experiences lived have redefined my views of American society." I focused my LL.M. on cybersecurity and privacy law. This led me to take fascinating courses such as Cybersecurity Law & Policy with Professor Robert Chesney. Professor Chesney has been one of the leading minds in national security law through his scholarship, teaching the next generation of lawyers, and co-founding the immensely popular Lawfare.blog. Professor Chesney helped me understand the legal intricacies of counseling companies, government, and individuals on data privacy and incident response management in the U.S. while comparing all this with the international landscape led by the GDPR framework of the E.U. To enhance what I was learning inside the classroom, Professor Chesney encouraged me to participate in an annual cyber policy and strategy competition called "Cyber 9/12," where we competed not only in Austin and D.C. but also in Geneva, Switzerland, coming in 1st place from among the American teams. After graduating from the LL.M. Program in May 2021, I just took the Texas bar exam and am awaiting those results.
Gabriel Cajiga, Class of 2021, Fulbright Student from Panama
"I completed a clerkship with Judge Michael J. Truncale for the Eastern District of Texas. I am currently clerking with the Texas Supreme Court's Justice Guzman. I am the first foreign LL.M. graduate Texas Law history to clerk for a U.S. Federal Court. Clerking for Judge Truncale has allowed me to fast-track the learning curve and made me feel very confident to begin practicing. My advice for foreign-trained lawyers interested in U.S. litigation is to take as many litigation-focused classes as possible during their LL.M., to participate in mock trials and moot court, and to focus on passing the bar exam to prove to employers they are able to learn a new legal system in a short period of time."
Isaac Villarreal, Class of 2018, Judicial Clerk at U.S. District Courts
