Mitchell Hamline School of Law is extending its innovative online learning platform to offer a redesigned weekend J.D. program that requires students to be on campus far fewer weekends.
Mitchell Hamline is the only law school in the country to receive a variance from the American Bar Association to allow students to earn a law degree by doing half their coursework online. The HYBRID J.D. program has been widely praised as a successful innovation in legal education since it debuted in January 2015. Now, Mitchell Hamline is using that same online system to allow weekend students to do one-third of their work online, on their own time. They only need to be present on campus seven weekends a semester instead of 13, which opens the program up to people who are working full-time and live in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, or anywhere that has direct flights to the Twin Cities.
“The weekend program is a vital part of Mitchell Hamline’s commitment to access to legal education,” said President and Dean Mark C. Gordon. “By marrying the traditional weekend program with our online capability, we are now able to make it more robust and attractive to students from around the country. The online platform has been phenomenally successful in our hybrid program, and it’s a perfect fit for our weekend offering.”
The redesigned program replaces Mitchell Hamline’s existing weekend program for all students entering in the fall of 2017. Students in the redesigned program will still attend part time and will typically take four years to finish their degree. They’ll follow the same academic year as full-time law students and are not required to take classes during the summer. Tuition is the same as for the school’s other part-time J.D. programs.
The Star Tribune featured a story about Mitchell Hamline’s weekend J.D. on Dec. 7, 2016.