Its campus includes the Bullocks Wilshire building, an Art Deco National Register of Historic Places landmark built in 1929.

Southwestern is an independent law school with affiliation to the undergraduate program at California State University, Northridge.

John J. Schumacher, its founder, intended the nonprofit institution to be a law school that reached out to women and minorities.

Southwestern's first home was in the Union Oil Building in downtown Los Angeles, followed by a small campus on South Hill Street, where it existed for the ensuing decades.

In 1994, Southwestern acquired the adjacent Bullocks Wilshire building, a historic landmark which was subsequently renovated to house the school's law library, classrooms, faculty offices, and court room and advocacy center.

[7] According to Southwestern's official 2022 ABA-required disclosures, 62.2% of the Class of 2022 obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after graduation, excluding solo-practitioners.

Low student-faculty ratio in the classroom promotes cooperative teaching and intellectual discussion among classmates.

Southwestern has joined forces with the Drucker Graduate School of Management to create dual-degree programs.

Students at Southwestern and the Drucker School, part of Claremont Graduate University (CGU), will be able to earn a J.D.

According to Dean Austen Parrish, the program will help young, promising undergraduate students pursue a legal education.

The program allows students to choose their own focus of study, from American Legal Systems to International Law to Technology Innovation and Commercialization.

On October 3, 2008, the Southwestern Journal of International Law hosted one of the first U.S. conferences on Arctic sovereignty, featuring legal scholars from both the United States and Canada.

Additionally, it examines the impact of the Internet and other technologies, the often conflicting laws affecting those issues, and the legal ramifications of widely divergent cultural views of privacy, defamation, intellectual property, and government regulation.

[16] Southwestern's 10,000 alumni include public officials as well as founders of law firms and general counsels of corporations.