It is housed in the Wilfred and Jules Kramer Law Building on the university's Middle Campus in Rondebosch, Cape Town.

Alumni have been particularly well-represented in the Cape Division of the High Court of South Africa and former Supreme Court of South Africa; several former Judges President of the division – including Theo van Wyk, George Munnik, Gerald Friedman, and Edwin King – studied law in the faculty.

[3] During a meeting on 23 February 1859, the SAC Council elected unanimously to appoint Jan Brand as the first professor of law.

[4] Brand's tenure ended in 1863, when he became the president of the Orange Free State; his two successors, Professors F. S. Watermeyer and A. W. Cole, served very brief stints before their death and resignation, respectively.

[3] However, throughout this period, there remained only a single chair in law, held by one or two men at a time; other teaching was provided by adjunct lecturers, who included Fritz Gardiner, Reginald Davis, George Sutton, Jackie de Villiers, Fraser Russell, and Albert van der Sandt Centlivres (all future judges).

[6][7] In April 1918, SAC was re-launched as the University of Cape Town (UCT); it conferred its first LLB degree in December 1919 to Frans Herman van der Willigen.

[5] The university pursued an open model of admissions, based primarily on academic criteria, abstaining from the colour bar approach favoured by Afrikaans-medium universities;[8] early black students at the law faculty included Fikile Bam, Dullah Omar, and Cissie Gool.

[3] Nonetheless, the faculty's black student population was extremely small, and it was further restricted with the formal inauguration of apartheid in 1948 and especially the Extension of University Education Act in 1959.

[3] The Wilfred and Jules Kramer Law Building, named after two major benefactors of the faculty, is located on UCT's Middle Campus in Rondebosch, Cape Town.

[9][10] After the end of apartheid in 1994, all UCT faculties provided equal access to all race groups and implemented strong affirmative action programmes.

Other postgraduate certifications – diplomas, LLMs, MPhils, and PhDs – are offered through the faculty's School for Advanced Legal Studies.

Separately, the faculty's Law@work unit provides short courses, seminars, and workshops to the general public.

[21] The oldest research unit is the Centre of Criminology, which was established in 1977 as the Institute of Crimonology; it was led first by Jannie van Rooyen and then by Rob Nairn.

[24] The faculty's law journal is Acta Juridica, founded in 1956 by Professor Ben-Zion Beinart and published annually by Juta and Company since 2001.