Law has been studied and taught in Cambridge since the thirteenth century, when the core subjects of legal study in all European universities were Civil law (the law of ancient Rome) and the Canon law of the Church. Early graduates of the Cambridge Faculty of Canon Law held the highest judicial positions in Europe - in the Rota at Avignon - and two of them (William Bateman and Thomas Fastolf) wrote the first known law reports in the ius commune tradition. The principal commentator on medieval English Canon law, William Lyndwood, was another graduate of the Faculty. The Faculty of Canon Law was closed by King Henry VIII in 1535, but the Faculty received some compensation when the same king appointed the first Regius Professor of Civil Law in about 1540. Academical legal learning was cosmopolitan; Cambridge doctors of law practised in the ecclesiastical and admiralty courts, assisted the nation in foreign embassies, and discoursed on law, justice and government in philosophical and comparative terms.

English law was added to the curriculum in 1800, with the foundation of the Downing Professorship of the Laws of England. Examinations in law for the B.A. Degree - the Law Tripos - began in 1858, and the Faculty grew steadily from that date in size and in the range of its interests. The Law Tripos was briefly united with History between 1868 and 1873 as the Law and History Tripos. The other established chairs in the Faculty are: the Whewell (International Law, 1867), the Rouse Ball (English Law, 1927), the Wolfson (Criminology, 1959), the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professorship (1971), the Professorship of Law (1973) the S.J. Berwin (Corporate Law, 1991), the Herchel Smith Professorship of Intellectual Property Law (1993), and the Professorship of European Law (1994).

The study of Law was undertaken in rooms around the Schools Quadrangle from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. New accommodation was also provided on land purchased from Downing College on Downing St (including for the Squire Law Library) from 1903. In 1968 the Library moved into the Cockerell Building on the Old Schools site. Office accommodation was also provided in the 1970s in Old Syndics Building behind the Pitt Press. The new Law Faculty building in West Road, designed by Lord Foster and Partners, and opened in 1995, brought together on one site the Squire Law Library, the Faculty's lecture and seminar rooms, the administrative offices, and common-room facilities. It doubled the shelf capacity of the library, increased the space for readers and provided a focus for Faculty activities, such as formal meetings, informal gatherings, and moots.

A further new building for the Institute of Criminology was completed adjacent to the Faculty of Law in the summer of 2005. Established as the Department of Criminal Science 1941, it became the Institute of Criminology in 1959 with the support of a benefaction from the Wolfson Foundation.

On 15 October 2016, the Faculty building was officially named the David Williams Building, in honour of the late Professor Sir David Williams.