I just sent off my application to Temple's Transnational LLM program for admission to their Tokyo campus in Fall of 2006. Does anyone know how competitive their admissions process is?

How did the process go? Did it seem to be quite competitive?

It appears to be, because I was denied admission. Although I did not graduate from a top tier law school, I felt that my application was quite competitive. I graduated Cum Laude, had a string of academic honors, publication in the law review, had a letter of reference from one of the law school deans, passed the California Bar Exam on my first try and am registered with the Unitd States Patent and Trademark Office. I will be somewhat disappointed if I was denied solely based on the rank of my law school, or my undergrduate gpa (not high because I had lots of personal issues which had a cumulative negative impact) because I feel like I wasn't judged on the quality of my application, but the reputation of my law school.

Thanks for your response. I'm going into my 2L year and am not at a top teir school either. I'm a former exchange student and JET teacher, and I know the Japanese are very big on the reputation of schools (though I'm not confident they know the difference between quality and name recognition). So I'm not too surprised to hear your story and I'm likely to have the same difficulty. I definately want to do a LLM in Japan, and I know there must be a lot of opportunities considering the Japanese recent revamping of the structure of their legal education system and the country's love of international exchange programs.

If anyone out there knows of good resources to find LLM programs in Japan, please let me know where to look. Thanks.

Believe it or not, even with the introduction of the new law school system in Japan, there are very few LLM programs to choose from. The only one taught in English is at Temple University Japan. The other handful of programs at Japanese universities require that you have passed level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. As for the post made by the previous person, he wasn't denied admittance based on how Japanese people perceive the ranking or reputation of his law school. Certainly that may have been a factor in the decisionmaking process, but not by Japanese people. All entrance decisions for the Temple LLM are made by the people in Philadelphia who are not Japanese.

By the way, I recently heard that the Japanese government is planning to terminate funding for the JET program. Is that true? If so, being a former JET will become irrelevant in the future.

There is also an English LL.M. at Kyushu University.