From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A M.S.L. is a master's degree offered by some law schools to students who wish to study the law but do not want to become attorneys. The degree has several variants, including a Master of Studies in Law degree (at the University of Toronto, for example), a Master in the Study of Law (at Ohio State), or simply a Master of Laws (at the University of Pittsburgh).

M.S.L. programs typically last one academic year and put students through the same regimen as a first-year J.D. student. M.S.L. students study such staples as constitutional law, torts, contracts, civil procedure, and other requirements alongside regular law students, writing the same papers and taking the same exams. But they graduate after accumulating two semesters of credit instead of six.

M.S.L. programs are usually designed for academics who hold Ph.D.s in a discipline related to the law, and who want to add a legal dimension to scholarship.

From the mid-1970's until 2004, there was also a unique M.S.L. program at Yale Law School for journalists. The program was a competitive fellowship offered to three or four applicants a year, chosen by the university. Yale provided free tuition, and the fellows also received a living stipend provided originally by the Ford Foundation and later by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. A number of reporters who currently cover the Supreme Court or other law-related issues for major mainstream media organizations are former fellows, including Barbara Bradley of NPR (1994), Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times (1978), Charles Lane (journalist) of the Washington Post (1997), Neil A. Lewis of the New York Times (1979), Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe (2003), and Viveca Novak of Time Magazine (1986). The program lost its funding after the 2003-04 academic year when the Knight Foundation declined to renew its grant.