Wilson is credited with being one of the two primary authors (the other being James Madison) of the first draft of such constitution,[13] due to his membership on the Committee of Detail[14] established by the United States Constitutional Convention on July 24, 1787, to draft a text reflecting the agreements made by the Convention up to that point.

[15]: page 264 As a professor at Penn, Wilson gave these lectures on law to President George Washington and Vice President John Adams and the rest of George Washington's cabinet, including Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

[16] Wilson was one of the original five U.S. Supreme Court associate justices nominated by George Washington and confirmed by the U.S. Senate via unanimous voice vote on September 26, 1789.

[3] Sharswood was also named Dean of Penn's Law School in 1852 and served through 1867,[21] and was later appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania (1879 - 1882).

[25] In 1900, the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania approved his and others' request to move the Law School to the core of campus and to its current location at the intersection of 34th and Chestnut Streets.

[28] As legal education became more formalized, the school initiated a three-year curriculum and instituted stringent admissions requirements.

[25] Other notable women who have been or are presently professors at Penn Carey Law include Lani Guinier, Elizabeth Warren, Anita L. Allen, and Dorothy Roberts.

Imasogie, a graduate of two law schools in Nigeria and London School of Economics and Political Science, has held senior positions with a diverse group of professional services and bio-tech companies such as GSK, DuPont, Merck, Price Waterhouse, Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis and is presently an adjunct professor at Penn Law, where he teaches a seminar on “Intellectual Property and National Economic Value Creation”.

The Harold Cramer Memorial Scholarship Program was established in June 2021 to ensure that all veterans admitted to the Law School will be able to afford to attend.

[36] Gittis Hall sits on the north side and has new classrooms (renovated in 2006) and new and expanded faculty offices.

[11] Based on student survey responses, ABA and NALP data; 99.6 percent of the Class of 2020 obtained full-time employment after graduation.

[41] Throughout its modern history, Penn has been known for its strong focus on inter-disciplinary studies, a character that was shaped early on by Dean William Draper Lewis.

[42] Its medium-size student body and the tight integration with the rest of Penn's schools (the "One University Policy")[43] have been instrumental in achieving that aim.

Students can also receive credit for completing externships with non-profit and government institutes such as the ACLU of Pennsylvania or the City of Philadelphia Law Department.

In October 2020, The Robert and Jane Toll Foundation announced that it was donating fifty million dollars ($50,000,000) to Penn Law, which is the largest gift in history to be devoted entirely to the training and support of public interest lawyers, and among the ten (10) largest gifts ever to a law school in the United States of America.

Students can create their own placements, or work through over 30 student-led organizations that focus their pro bono service in a variety of substantive areas.

Penn Law hosts eleven different academic centers, institutes, programs, and research groups wherein students and faculty work together on interdisciplinary scholarship.

Penn’s Law library holds over one million volumes, mostly consisting of American primary and secondary materials.

Approximately one-third of the Library’s collection is composed of foreign, international, and comparative legal texts.

The Library also holds subscriptions for digital resources such as LexisNexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law, which provide students and faculty with access to wide breadth of journal articles, treatises, and case texts.

[52] Other law journals include: Since 2000, Penn has had seven alumni serve as judicial clerks at the United States Supreme Court.

"[63] About 75 percent of each graduating class enters private practice, bringing with them the ethos of pro bono service.

[106] The School has also built a strong reputation for its law and economics group (professors Tom Baker, Jon Klick, and Natasha Sarin), its criminal law group (professors Stephanos Bibas, Leo Katz, Stephen J. Morse, Paul H. Robinson, and David Rudovsky) and its legal history group (professors Sally Gordon, Sophia Lee, Serena Mayeri, Karen Tani).

Past and present Bok professors include Helena Alviar (Dean of Faculty of Law, University of the Andes), Pratap Bhanu Mehta (President of the Centre for Policy Research in India), Armin von Bogdandy (Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law), Radhika Coomaraswamy (Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Special Rapporteur for Children and Armed Conflict 2006-2012, Member of the UN Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar), Juan Guzmán Tapia (the first judge who prosecuted former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet), Indira Jaising (Former Additional Solicitor General of India), Maina Kiai (UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association 2011-2017), Akua Kuenyehia (Former Judge of the International Criminal Court; Former Law Dean of University of Ghana), Pratap Bhanu Mehta (President of the Centre for Policy Research in India), and Michael Trebilcock (Distinguished University Professor at the University of Toronto).

Some of Penn's former faculty members have continued their careers at other institutions (e.g., Bruce Ackerman (now at Yale), Lani Guinier (now at Harvard), Michael H. Schill (now at Oregon), Myron T. Steele (now at Virginia), and Elizabeth Warren (at Harvard until her election to the United States Senate).