GW Law Business and Finance Law Program Guide 2026

GW Law Business and Finance Law Program Overview

The George Washington University Law School’s Business and Finance Law Program stands as one of the most comprehensive legal training programs in the field, uniquely positioned at the intersection of public policy and private enterprise in Washington, D.C. The program prepares students for legal practice across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors in all aspects of business and financial law — from corporate governance and securities regulation to antitrust enforcement and international finance.

What distinguishes GW Law’s business program from competitors is its dual-city architecture. While the law school maintains its dominant presence in the nation’s capital — steps from the SEC, IMF, World Bank, and FINRA — it also commands a significant presence in New York City through the groundbreaking GWNY program. This combination gives students access to both the regulatory and transactional centers of American business and finance law, an advantage no other single law school can claim.

The program serves approximately 60 students concentrating in business and finance law at any given time, creating an environment that balances the breadth of a major research university with the individualized attention of a focused program. With 14 full-time faculty members and 50 distinguished practitioners serving as adjunct professors, the student-faculty ratio ensures meaningful mentorship and engagement. For prospective students evaluating law programs with strong business concentrations, understanding how institutions like other top university graduate programs structure their training provides valuable comparative context.

Three Degree Paths in Business and Finance Law

GW Law offers three distinct pathways into its Business and Finance Law Program, each designed to serve different professional populations while maintaining identical academic rigor. The Juris Doctor (JD) provides the traditional law degree with a concentration in business and finance law, ideal for students beginning their legal careers. The Master of Laws (LLM) in Business and Finance Law serves both U.S.-educated attorneys who already hold a JD and international students with primary law degrees from their home countries, offering advanced specialization for practicing professionals.

The third pathway — the Master of Studies in Law (MSL) in Business and Finance — addresses a growing need among non-lawyer professionals who require sophisticated legal knowledge without pursuing a full law degree. Financial analysts, compliance officers, corporate executives, and regulatory professionals can deepen their understanding of business and finance law through this focused program. All three degree tracks share the same rigorous curriculum, creating diverse classrooms where students of different ages, backgrounds, and experiences learn from both their professors and each other.

This multi-track structure represents a thoughtful response to the reality that business and finance law intersects with numerous professional fields. A compliance officer at a major bank benefits from understanding securities regulation at the same depth as a practicing attorney — and studying alongside JD candidates brings perspectives that pure professional programs cannot replicate. The shared classroom model also builds professional networks that span traditional boundaries between lawyers and the business professionals they serve.

Comprehensive Business Law Curriculum at GW Law

The breadth of GW Law’s course catalog in business and finance law is genuinely exceptional, with more than 75 courses spanning every major area of the field. Core offerings include Banking Law, Corporate Finance, Corporations, Law and Accounting, and Securities Regulation — foundational courses that every business law practitioner needs. From this base, students can specialize deeply in their area of interest or pursue broad training across multiple subfields.

The capital markets track includes courses in Regulation of Derivatives, Regulation of Mutual Funds, and Venture Capital Law. Commercial law offerings cover Business Bankruptcy and Reorganization, Secured Transactions, and Creditors’ Rights. For students drawn to the international dimension of business law, courses in International Banking and Investment Law, International Business Transactions, International Commercial Law, International Finance, and International Taxation provide comprehensive global training. The tax track alone offers Business Planning, Corporate Taxation, Employee Benefit Plans, Nonprofit Organizations: Law and Taxation, and Partnership and LLC Taxation.

Most classes are taught in small seminar format, a deliberate choice that promotes deep engagement with complex material and meaningful faculty-student interaction. Skills-building courses in Business Lawyering, Negotiations, and Legal Drafting (Transactional) ensure that students develop practical competencies alongside doctrinal knowledge. Special focus areas including Admiralty, Entertainment Law, Insurance, and Sports and the Law allow students to explore niche practice areas where business law intersects with specific industries. This combination of breadth, depth, and practical skills training creates graduates who are prepared for the diverse demands of modern business law practice.

GWNY: GW Law’s Immersive New York City Program

The GWNY program represents GW Law’s most distinctive innovation in business and finance legal education. Founded in 2015, this immersive program sends select students to live and study in New York City each spring — an opportunity that no other law school in the country offers. In the financial capital of the world, students engage directly with leading practitioners and institutions through a carefully designed combination of academic seminars, field placements, and professional development workshops.

The program features a full slate of academic seminar courses taught in New York, immersive field placements at financial institutions and regulatory bodies, and extensive reflective learning opportunities. Students participate in workshops on professional development, seminars, and networking events that leverage New York City’s unparalleled concentration of business and finance law practitioners. Most of the adjunct faculty members teaching in the GWNY program are GW Law alumni themselves, creating a mentorship pipeline that connects current students with established professionals.

GWNY uses its physical presence in New York as a platform to support broader programming for the law school. The experiential component goes beyond traditional externships — students are embedded in the daily operations of major financial institutions, gaining the kind of practical knowledge that simply cannot be taught in a Washington, D.C. classroom. Combined with the law school’s home base near the SEC, CFTC, and other federal regulators, GWNY gives students a complete picture of how business and finance law operates across both its regulatory and transactional dimensions.

Clinical Programs and Practical Experience at GW Law

Practical legal training at GW Law begins with the Small Business and Community Economic Development (SBCED) Clinic, one of the oldest programs of its kind in the country, founded in 1977. Through this clinic, students advise pro bono clients in matters of business formation and development while earning academic credit. Clients include entrepreneurs, social enterprises, nonprofit groups, artists, and arts organizations — providing exposure to the business law needs of organizations across the economic spectrum.

The Field Placement Program taps into Washington, D.C. and New York City’s extraordinary concentration of business and financial regulatory institutions. Students can earn academic credit while gaining supervised work experience at organizations including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). New York placements additionally include positions at bankruptcy, commercial, and international trade courts.

This dual-city placement infrastructure creates opportunities that reflect the full scope of modern business and finance law practice. A student might spend one semester working at the SEC in Washington, developing expertise in regulatory enforcement, and another in New York City at SIFMA, understanding how the financial industry responds to and shapes regulation. The combination of clinical work serving small businesses and field placements at the world’s most influential financial institutions produces graduates who understand business law from both the regulatory and practitioner perspectives. If you are comparing graduate programs across top universities, GW Law’s practical training infrastructure stands out for its institutional reach.

Faculty Excellence and Scholarship at GW Law

The Business and Finance Law Program’s faculty represents what GW Law describes as its “foremost strength and differentiator.” Fourteen internationally respected full-time faculty members are joined by 50 distinguished practitioners who serve as adjunct professors, creating a teaching team that bridges academic scholarship and professional practice. This combination ensures students learn from both leading researchers shaping legal theory and experienced attorneys navigating real-world business transactions and regulatory challenges.

Faculty scholarship impact over the past five years demonstrates the program’s intellectual leadership: 20 books published, 80 law journal articles or book chapters, mentions in hundreds of mainstream media stories and thousands of scholarly works, and scholarship downloaded more than 200,000 times on SSRN. Faculty members have published leading textbooks in accounting for lawyers, antitrust, corporations, securities, and tax — the foundational texts used by business law professors nationwide. The faculty includes public company directors, former U.S. regulatory authority commissioners, international fellowship recipients, and recipients of numerous professional awards and honors.

Faculty Director Lawrence A. Cunningham serves as the Henry St. George Tucker III Research Professor of Law, specializing in corporate law, accounting, and investing. He also founded the GWNY program and directs C-LEAF, the Center for Law, Economics and Finance. Other notable faculty include William E. Kovacic, the Global Competition Professor of Law and Policy who directs the Competition Law Center, and Theresa A. Gabaldon, the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law specializing in securities regulation and accounting. This depth of specialized expertise across faculty ensures that students receive expert instruction in every area of the business and finance law curriculum.

Centers, Research Initiatives, and Student Life

GW Law houses five centers and initiatives within the Business and Finance Law Program, each addressing a distinct area of the field. The Center for Law, Economics and Finance (C-LEAF) promotes interdisciplinary research connecting legal scholarship with economic and financial analysis. The Quality Shareholders Initiative (QSI) focuses on corporate governance and the role of long-term institutional investors. The Competition Law Center, directed by Professor Kovacic, addresses antitrust policy and enforcement. The Falk Academy for Management and Entrepreneurship (FAME) supports students interested in business formation and startup law, while the Tax Law Center provides a focused research environment for tax policy scholars.

Student engagement extends through six dedicated law societies: the Antitrust and Trade Law Society, Banking and Finance Law Society, Corporate and Business Law Society, Entertainment and Sports Law Society, Entrepreneurship and Law Society, and Tax Law Society. These organizations host networking, professional, and social activities year-round, creating community among students with shared practice interests. The student-edited Business and Finance Law Review publishes articles by professors, lawyers, and students, providing both a forum for scholarly exchange and practical experience in legal editing and publishing.

The program sponsors more than 20 events annually showcasing leading practitioners and policy makers. Recent conference topics have included megabanks, sports finance, the digital economy, board diversity, and quality shareholders. The annual Manuel Cohen Lecture — named after the former GW Law faculty member who led the Securities and Exchange Commission — brings distinguished speakers to campus, continuing a tradition of connecting students with the leaders shaping business and finance law. For students seeking programs with vibrant research communities, comparing GW Law’s offerings with programs like Emory University’s interdisciplinary graduate programs highlights how top institutions create collaborative academic environments.

Career Outcomes and the GW Law Alumni Network

Among recent graduating classes, the majority of JD graduates with a concentration in business and finance law received job offers from highly desired employers including major D.C. corporate law firms, major New York corporate law firms, boutique firms, companies, and government agencies. This placement success reflects both the quality of the program’s training and the strength of its professional networks — particularly the dual-city infrastructure that gives students meaningful connections in both Washington and New York before graduation.

The GW Law alumni network spans 27,000 professionals worldwide, with the Business and Finance Law Program strongly represented throughout. Alumni serve as managing partners and top attorneys at the nation’s leading law firms, senior executives and principals at major corporations, and distinguished leaders in nonprofit and government service. More importantly for current students, alumni actively serve as mentors and points of contact, providing career guidance and professional introductions that accelerate early career development.

The mentorship infrastructure is deeply embedded in the program’s operations. Most GWNY adjunct faculty are GW Law alumni, and others serve on the law school’s Business and Finance Law Advisory Council. Distinguished alumni frequently cite their GW Law training as pivotal to their successful careers — and demonstrate that commitment by investing time in the next generation. This self-reinforcing cycle of alumni engagement means that students benefit not only from current faculty expertise but from a living network of practitioners who understand the program’s values and capabilities from personal experience.

Strategic Advantage: Washington DC Location

Location shapes legal education more profoundly than almost any other factor, and GW Law’s position at 2000 H Street, NW in Washington, D.C. provides advantages that cannot be replicated elsewhere. The law school sits within walking distance of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. This proximity transforms these institutions from abstract entities in casebooks into accessible workplaces where students build professional relationships through field placements and networking events.

Washington, D.C. offers an unmatched density of regulatory agencies, government departments, law firms, lobbying organizations, and policy think tanks focused on business and financial regulation. Students can attend congressional hearings on financial regulation, participate in SEC rulemaking comment processes, or observe enforcement actions at FINRA — experiences that provide context and practical understanding no classroom simulation can match. The city’s large concentration of law firms with robust business and finance practices creates extensive employment opportunities for both summer internships and post-graduation positions.

The D.C. location also positions students at the center of ongoing policy debates about financial regulation, corporate governance, securities enforcement, and international trade — the issues that define the future of business and finance law. Students who study in Washington develop an intuitive understanding of how regulation is made, influenced, and implemented that serves them throughout their careers, whether they practice in the capital or elsewhere. Combined with the GWNY program’s New York presence, GW Law provides the most geographically comprehensive business law education available at any single institution.

GW Law Business and Finance Law Admissions

Admission to GW Law’s Business and Finance Law Program follows the standard application processes for each degree track. JD applicants submit through the law school’s general admissions process at admissions@law.gwu.edu or (202) 994-1010, with the business and finance concentration declared during enrollment. LLM candidates — both U.S.-educated attorneys and international law graduates — apply through llmadmissions@law.gwu.edu, while MSL applicants contact msladmissions@law.gwu.edu. The Graduate and International Programs office at (202) 994-7242 provides guidance for international applicants navigating the process.

The program’s diverse student body includes individuals from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, every U.S. state, Canada, and Mexico. This global representation creates classrooms where perspectives on business and finance law reflect the international nature of modern commercial practice. Students bring varied professional backgrounds — from recent undergraduates to mid-career professionals, from finance specialists to those transitioning from other fields — creating an enhanced educational environment where peer learning supplements faculty instruction.

Prospective students should consider which degree path best aligns with their career goals and current qualifications. The JD concentration suits those beginning legal careers with a business and finance focus. The LLM provides advanced specialization for practicing attorneys seeking to deepen their expertise or shift into business law from other practice areas. The MSL offers sophisticated legal knowledge to professionals who need to understand the regulatory environment without obtaining a full law degree. Regardless of track, all students access the same 75+ course catalog, the same faculty, and the same professional opportunities through field placements, GWNY, and the broader GW Law network. More information about the complete program is available through the GW Law Business and Finance Law website.