page_title: Washington College of Law
section_title: Continuing growth
hierarchical_section_title: Washington College of Law / History / Continuing growth
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the American University Washington College of Law's Capital Building from Tenley Circle
context_page_description: The American University Washington College of Law is the law school of American University. It is located on the western side of Tenley Circle in the Tenleytown section of Northwest Washington, D.C., one block south of the Tenleytown-AU Metro station. The school is fully accredited by the American Bar Association, and a member of the AALS.
  WCL is ranked 77th in the nation in the Best Law Schools by U.S. News & World Report, and has highly ranked specialty programs in Clinical Training, Trial Advocacy, Intellectual Property, Part-Time Law, International Law, and Health Care Law. It was recently ranked by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2019 as 75th in the world for law.
  Begun in 1896, it was the first law school to be founded by women, the first with a female dean, and the first to graduate an all-female class.
context_section_description: Washington D.C. incorporated WCL in 1898.  After several temporary locations, the school moved to the Le Droit Building on 8th & F Streets in 1900. Enrollment rose to 55 students by 1908 and doubled in five years to 128 students.  Dean Mussey secured a lease in 1909 in the Chesley Building on New York Ave, until the school outgrew the six-classroom lease.  The school moved to its first permanent home in 1920; the former residence of Robert G. Ingersoll on K Street.  Continually growing, WCL moved in 1924 to the former home of Oscar Underwood, and former residence of Archibald Butt.  WCL merged with American University in 1949 and graduated its first African American student in 1953.
  The Women & the Law Program was launched in 1948, to promote the integration of women's rights and gender studies into legal education, practice and doctrine.
  After years of work by Dean Myers, the John Sherman Myers Law School building was constructed on the American University main campus and dedicated in 1963 by Chief Justice Earl Warren.  In the same year, U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) graduated from WCL after ten years of night-study classes, the first time a sitting member of Congress had begun and completed a law degree while serving.
  By 1988, WCL had grown to over 1,000 students.  Dean Milstein pushed for a new building, and in 1996 WCL moved less than a mile to The John Sherman Myers and Alvina Reckman Myers Law Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the American University Park section of Northwest Washington, D.C.  The building was two and a half times larger than the previous Myers building, and included the new Pence Law Library.
caption: View of the American University Washington College of Law's Capital Building from Tenley Circle
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