Just as HLS's grading policies are different from many law schools', so is the new "law college" format. Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the Institutional Life Committee at HLS, emphasized that the system is not modeled on other schools'.

"This does not look like anything at Yale," she said. "We will be the first law school in the country to try something quite like this."

In addition to offering classes for students as a group, each college will host speakers, provide advising and hold social events and intramural sports competitions.

"The plan right now is to provide a physical space for each college--a space where students can have lunch, drop off their books, receive a phone call, hang out," Warren said.

But Professor of Law Joseph W. Singer, chair of the HLS Infrastructure and Resources Committee, said no decision has been made on where that space might be--or how it would be allocated. The law school is already cramped, he said, and the new colleges do not take precedence over other space needs.

"There's no space that I imagine we could give them right now," Singer said. "The colleges would work better with space allocated to them."