This year, a record number of students applied to Michigan Law: 9,118. The 322 students in the incoming class come from a range of institutions and areas of study, and from across the United States and around the world.
The students’ median age, 25.5, is the oldest in decades, and possibly ever, said Sarah Zearfoss, ’92, senior assistant dean. About 92 percent of the incoming class has completed a year or more of work or additional school in between earning their bachelor’s degree and coming to Michigan Law.
“While our admissions process aims to enroll people who are smart and full of academic potential, it also aims to admit voices who are going to enrich the classroom dialogue. One source of that enrichment comes from the work experiences people accumulate before arriving here,” said Zearfoss.
A quarter of the incoming class has worked as paralegals, which Zearfoss said is likely an all-time high.
This year, Michigan Law saw an influx of applicants from the federal government. “A perhaps unanticipated silver lining for the recent shrinking of the federal workforce has been the enrichment of the law school application pool,” Zearfoss said.
These students include a senior judicial assistant to retired US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, an economic growth officer for Egypt and Liberia at USAID, a policy adviser for the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security, and a special agent for criminal investigations at the IRS.
Students represent 139 undergrad institutions. Thirteen percent of the class are first-generation college students; for 15 percent, their JD will be their second or third advanced degree.
Outside of their work and academics, the Class of 2029 encompasses a mix of backgrounds and interests. “The people who pop out as being right for this community are the ones who are unusually interesting, in both how they see the world and how they express themselves,” Zearfoss said.
Their hobbies range from oyster farming and ice spear fishing to cave diving, professional running, and Rubik’s speed cubing.
The newest Michigan Law students come from 46 states and Washington, DC. The largest number is from Michigan, followed by California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Illinois. And they come from 20 countries.
Class of 2029 Academic Information
Applied
9,118
Enrolled
322
Median GPA
3.90
Median LSAT
172
Majors Represented
55
One or more years off after undergrad
92%
Most Popular Undergrad Majors
- Business administration
- Economics
- English
- Environmental sciences
- Finance
- History
- International studies
- Philosophy
- Political science
- Psychology
- Public policy
The Class of 2029 represents the highest application volume, median LSAT, and median GPA in Michigan Law’s history.
Class of 2029 Demographics
Racial Composition
- Asian American 19.8%
- Latinx 11.1%
- Black/African American 8.4%
- Native American 2.2%
- Hawaiian 1.2%
- White 59.1%
- Multiracial 13.9%
- Not Indicated 1.5%
Percentages include students who identify in more than one category.
Median Age
25.5
Age Range
22-44
First-generation college graduate
13%
Gender Composition
Men
51%
Women
49%
Nonbinary or other genders
<1%
LGBTQ+
25%
Class of 2029: Where are they from?
Michigan Residents
19%
States Represented
46
Plus Washington, DC
Countries Represented
20
Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
Top Undergrad Schools
- Cornell University
- Dartmouth College
- Georgetown University
- Harvard University
- Indiana University
- Michigan State University
- Middlebury College
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Chicago
- University of Michigan
- Vanderbilt University
- Washington University
Meet a few of our students
Fatima Yahya
Born in Iraq, Fatima Yahya was 4 or 5 years old when she and her family fled the war there and settled in Syria. When war started in Syria several years later, the United Nations helped her family seek asylum and enter the United States as refugees.
On her first day of middle school in Chicago, Yahya noticed a stark difference from her experience growing up under two dictatorships. Reciting the US pledge of allegiance was not the same as reciting the pledge in Syria, where everyone was “forced to fall under [then-president] Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny,” she said. “The way that he ran things in Syria—I was under the impression that’s how the entire world was.”
Being exposed to this democratic rule of law from a young age piqued Yahya’s curiosity to learn more, and her teachers played a formative part in her learning. “My social studies teacher would sit there with me for hours and explain to me the different types of governments, answering every question about the rule of law,” she recalled.
Her curiosity kept growing, and she observed “the gaps between the freedoms granted in our Constitution and the way those protections are actually manifested,” she said. “I would hear of protestors getting arrested, and I’m like, wait, no, our First Amendment protects this.” These discrepancies and her background compelled her to study the law.
At Wayne State University, Yahya earned bachelor’s degrees in political science and philosophy, with a co-major in peace and conflict studies. During college, she was involved in voter advocacy and engagement while working in multiple political campaigns, including as a field organizer for a congressional campaign.
After graduation, Yahya worked as a district manager for the Michigan House majority floor leader, did a legal internship with an attorney, and then worked for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as an issue specialist. Yahya isn’t sure what path she’ll pursue after law school, but she’s eager to extend the “Michigan difference” wherever she can make an impact.
Blake McGhghy
A first-generation college student, Blake McGhghy majored in science and technology studies at Harvard University and earned his master’s in social sciences from the University of Chicago. He received a fellowship to work at an environmental think tank in India and learn Hindi, and that ended at the outbreak of COVID.
As COVID intensified and people were questioning “the role of expertise and who to trust,” McGhghy said, he was interested in how to build better relationships between communities and science. He pursued a Civic Science Fellowship at the American Association for the Advancement of Science to do exactly that. “I explored how science organizations can work with communities and support local priorities more equitably,” he said.
That experience led McGhghy to work with a program of the American Geophysical Union that connected underserved communities with pro bono scientists, lawyers, and other experts to develop solutions to a range of challenges, such as pollution. “I was inspired by the innovative solutions that communities were leading but also saw how communities often needed an advocate and policy change to make a lasting difference,” he said.
Next McGhghy worked in the policy office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Complications around the government’s response served as “a big wake-up call to the ways that public law can impact people on their worst days,” he said.
Through his experience at these organizations, he said, “I witnessed how public trust, expertise, and law interact with and shape each other.” He came to Michigan Law to better understand and help improve these interactions.
Originally from small-town Iowa, McGhghy said the community aspect of Michigan Law appealed to him. “Michigan feels like a community where people look out for and support each other.”
Meredith Johnston
Before arriving in Ann Arbor, Meredith Johnston spent four and a half years as a surface warfare officer in the US Navy, which involved both driving a ship and leading a division of 30 sailors. Her division was operations intelligence, focused on the combat information center, where the sailors identified any inbound threats and communicated them up to the bridge.
“I rapidly gained managerial experience when I arrived to my first ship” and learned how to work under extreme pressure, she said.
Johnston graduated from Columbia University with a degree in environmental biology, and she worked as a hydrologic technician for the US Geological Survey on a Navy base on Oahu, focusing on water resource management.
Now, Johnston wants to pursue environmental torts. “One of the reasons I chose Michigan is its strong energy and environmental law program, on top of the federal Indian law curriculum,” she said. As a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, she wanted to be at a law school that “prioritizes the innate understanding between tribal relationships with the United States” and gives graduates “a fundamental understanding of how American Indians interact with federal law.”
The strength of the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) at Michigan Law was a draw. When Johnston was admitted, a Michigan Law NALSA alum was the first to contact her about coming to Ann Arbor.
Originally from Texas, Johnston looks forward to bridging some of her interests, including environmental and tribal law, at the Law School.
She added, “I know law school will be challenging, but I’m looking forward to being able to study in the comfort of my home or a library, rather than a ship’s engine room.”
Cameron Thomas
The first time Cameron Thomas performed as a DJ, while in undergrad, he was booed. That experience taught him resilience—but also the importance of pursuing his passions even in the face of challenges.
After earning a master of public health degree in 2022 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Thomas started working as a public health analyst in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, dealing with issues such as overdose, suicide, and adverse childhood experiences. He liked connecting people with the resources they needed, and he thought he might stay at the CDC long term.
But Thomas had always had some interest in law school. Last year, he decided to take the LSAT, and while he was studying for it, his entire office was laid off. “It was a blessing and a curse,” he said, and it put law school front and center. “It was like a dream deferred, where I thought about doing this before, and now here’s the perfect opportunity.”
While trying to learn about the law school application process, “I found Dean Z’s A2Z video series, and honestly, that was pretty much everything that I was looking for,” he said, referring to admissions how-to videos that Zearfoss began hosting in 2020. Her videos helped him build his application—and also got him interested in Michigan Law, which initially wasn’t on his list, as he had spent his whole life in Georgia and North Carolina.
“Then I came for Preview Weekend, and it really cemented my feeling that Michigan was the right place for me,” he said. He looks forward to getting to know his new community and exploring some of his interests at the Law School beyond public health, such as the Michigan Sports Law Society.
Jonny Dalsey
A lifelong interest in sports led Jonny Dalsey to a job with the San Francisco 49ers after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles. He worked in business strategy and analytics, which meant using a lot of personal data on people buying season tickets, for example.
The data, purchased from data brokers, included things like people’s income and where they live. “That got me intrigued about data privacy and how this information is collected,” he said. He started looking into “what you’re actually consenting to when you’re clicking ‘accept’ on the bottom of all those websites.”
What he found was alarming. “I don’t think that people have an understanding of, one, how much information companies are actually collecting and then, two, how they’re actually going to use it,” he said. “All of that information is being aggregated to create a pretty complex and accurate profile about you.”
Dalsey talked to some friends in law school about this. Their conversation “transformed this broad idea I had of ‘someone should do something about this,’ to ‘Oh, maybe I could do something about this.’” He started thinking about law school.
While at the 49ers, Dalsey founded the team’s LGBTQ employee relations group, the first in the NFL. “I am gay and I’ve always been really passionate about making sure that people who are queer feel like they have a place in sports,” he said.
“It got me more interested in organizing and advocating for people,” he said, although it involved difficult conversations. “It improved my ability to speak to people who are coming from differing or even adverse perspectives.”
Having that opportunity only a couple of years after college was a formative experience, he said. “I think that’s going to help me when I’m in similarly adverse situations in my law career.”
Dalsey looks forward to learning from professors whose research he has followed, learning more about the legal issues at play in personal data collection, and—as a sports fan—attending Michigan football games.