Best Universities for Law & Public Policy

Law and public policy are fields where Indian students need to be especially clear-eyed about their goals. A law degree from a foreign country does not automatically let you practice law in India or anywhere else — licensing is jurisdiction-specific. If you want to practice in the US, you need a JD (3 years, $60,000-$70,000/year) plus bar passage. If you want to practice in the UK, you need an LLB or GDL plus SQE. An LLM (1-year masters) from Harvard or Oxford is prestigious but it is a credential booster, not a license to practice.

That said, international law, public policy, and international relations are fields where a foreign degree is genuinely transformative. Georgetown SFS, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Oxford (PPE), LSE, and King's College London are pipelines into the UN, World Bank, think tanks, and diplomatic services. These programs do not require a law undergraduate degree — they accept students from economics, political science, and liberal arts backgrounds.

The students who get the most value from studying law or policy abroad are those with a specific career target: international arbitration (Queen Mary London is #1), human rights law (Oxford, NYU), trade policy (Georgetown, SAIS), or development (SOAS, LSE). If you just want a law degree to practice corporate law in Mumbai, an NLU in India is more efficient and practical. An LLM abroad makes sense only if you already have an Indian law degree and want to specialize or build an international network.