Academic and Language Requirements

To be considered for the program, applicants must have received, or expect to receive by the summer of 2012, a first complete law degree (such as a Bologna Master degree, a J.D. or an LL.B.) or another academic qualification deemed equivalent by the Program Directors.

Applicants whose primary language is not English and who did not receive their university education in the English language must take a language proficiency test (TOEFL or IELTS). The admissions committee looks for a TOEFL score of 550 in the paper-based test, 213 in the computer-based test and 79 in the Internet-based test, or an IELTS overall score of 5.5. Applicants with at least two years of professional experience in English may request a waiver of this requirement. A passive understanding of French is an asset, though not a requisite.

In order to keep our faculty-student ratio low, we seek to enroll no more than 40 students each year, based on the strength of their record of academic or professional achievements.

Application Procedures

Please note that an application for scholarship should be made jointly with the general application.

At the moment there are unfortunately no scholarships available for applicants coming from high-income countries.

Application Materials

To apply to the program, applicants must submit a complete application file, containing:

1. a filled in Application Form;
2. a filled Scholarship Application Form (only if applicants apply for admission with scholarship);
3. a curriculum vitae;
4. a personal statement explaining the applicant's interest in the program;
5. two letters of recommendation;
6. copies of relevant degrees and diplomas, with an officially certified translation when not in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish;
7. copies of official records of university examinations taken and grades obtained, with the same need for translation as above;
8. the tables of contents and 10-page excerpts of the main essays written by the candidate in the course of university studies, if and where such theses exist and are available in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish;
9. TOEFL or IELTS score.

Please do not staple or bind the pages of your application and do not send original documents, as all submitted materials become the property of the LL.M. program upon receipt and will be neither returned to the applicant nor forwarded to other schools or agencies.

We accept applications sent by mail or e-mail to our standard contact address or through our online submission system, available at www.mids.ch/students/application.php.

Application Deadline

For the 2012-2013 program, the deadline for applications is set to 1 February 2012. It is the applicant's responsibility to make certain that all items are delivered to our offices on or before the application deadline.

There is no application fee.

Communicating with the Applications Office

A notification will be sent to you confirming receipt of your application fairly quickly along with a message indicating whether your application is complete or not. We make every effort to keep our admission process as swift as possible and therefore regret that we cannot reply to telephone, fax, or email inquiries asking us to verify receipt of application materials or confirm application status.

Our applications office deals exclusively with admission to the MIDS. Inquiries regarding other programs, including PhD programs, at the University of Geneva or the Graduate Institute should be addressed to their respective secretariats.