Admissions

For now, JSW Law offers two programs:

1. BA.LL.B./PGDNL: This is a 5 year integrated program offered to undergraduate students.
2. PGDNL: This is a one year program offered to graduate students. This program is most commonly provided to those graduates who have completed their BA.LLB or law program from outside Bhutan.
3. LLM: This program (by coursework or research) is a one- or two-year program designed for those with legal training and experiences in law to give expanded knowledge of law or subject specialization. MLS Program will allow those coming from non-legal backgrounds and experiences to pursue a postgraduate legal education. The program will begin from August, 2025.

• Class 12 Results: You must have obtained at least 60% in both Dzongkha and English. Your performance in Class 12, especially in Dzongkha and English, is important.  
• Bhutan-LSAT: All applicants meeting the above-mentioned cut-off are required to sit for the Bhutan-LSAT, a Law School Admissions Test. The score on the Bhutan-LSAT will be a significant factor in the selection process.  
• Dzongkha Test: You will need to take a Dzongkha test for us to assess your language proficiency.  
• Face-to-Face Interview: Shortlisted candidates will be invited for a face-to-face interview. Your performance in the interview will be assessed to evaluate your oratory skills and listening comprehension, maturity and “social fit,” and overall suitability (motivation and enthusiasm) for the program.
• Other Requirement:
  • Applicant must not have reached the age of 24 years old by the date of the closing of applications;
  • Applicant must not have previously applied for admission to the Program more than once
  • Applicant must have completed the equivalent of Grade XII at a foreign educational institution

YES! We care about your academic results. In fact, given the importance of language skills for lawyers, we can not consider any applications from students who secured below 60% in either Dzongkha or English in their class 12 exams.  

As for other subject scores, yes we will consider them, however, we do not have qualifying percentage scores like in Dzongkha and English. But your high school grades are not the only thing we consider in our application process.

We care as much or more about the skills you have that will make you successful as a lawyer (such as your ability to think logically, your problem-solving skills, your fluency with the written language, and your ability to critically analyze an argument and when appropriate — respond with a counter-argument of your own).

You may have honed some of these skills at school–or in your private life outside of school–but they will not be prominently reflected in your class 12 marks. For this reason, we have designed our own JSW Law entrance examination (Bhutan-LSAT-Law School Admission Test) that will test you on precisely these skills. Moreover, we weigh the score you get on our entrance examination at 1 1⁄2 times the weight we assign to your class 12 marks!

Once we have made a first cut of our applicant pool based on these two “numbers” (your class 12 marks and your score on our entrance examination), we next want to find out more about who you are as a person.  Since no one examination can ever capture that, we will invite all of our final candidates to our office (Pangbisa, Paro) for an in-person interview with JSW Law faculty.  During that interview, we will want to know what motivates you to become a lawyer as opposed to some other profession? What makes you excited about this career? What are your phobias? What kind of law might you one-day hope to practice?

As we like to say, the legal profession is more than “just a job,” and we wish to create a healthy community of colleagues even before you graduate from JSW Law to become a lawyer. For this reason, we will rank this in-person interview almost as highly as we do your class grade 12 scores.