The School of Law, founded in 1835, is the oldest professional school of New York University and one of the oldest law schools in the nation. Benjamin F. Butler, at the time attorney general in the cabinet of President Andrew Jackson, drew up the “Plan for the Organization of a Law Faculty” for NYU, which outlined a three-year curriculum. Butler’s plan, the first designed to teach law by the course method, became the model for the structure of modern legal education.