The youngest son of Bo Xilai, the former senior Communist Party official now awaiting a criminal trial, has enrolled at Columbia Law School and is expected to begin studies this fall, according to a family associate and a person from Beijing with high-level contacts.

The son, Bo Guagua, is a prominent figure in the third generation of an aristocratic Communist Party family. He earned an undergraduate degree from Oxford and a master’s degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and he has been living in the United States since he completed that degree in May 2012. His exploits since his Oxford days have fascinated many Chinese, and photographs of him at parties with his arms draped around young women have circulated widely on the Internet. He was known to have driven around Cambridge, Mass., in a Porsche.

Several Harvard professors said he was serious about his studies there. Mr. Bo had been interested in pursuing a law degree in the United States even before the downfall of his father, who was removed from his position as party chief of the municipality of Chongqing in March 2012, as a scandal involving a dead British businessman unfolded. Last year, a Chinese court decided that Mr. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, would serve a suspended death sentence — equivalent to life in prison — for murdering the businessman, Neil Heywood.

Mr. Bo was put under house arrest in March 2012, after being dismissed from his Chongqing post, and he was later moved to a formal detention center. Last week, prosecutors in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province, charged him with bribe-taking, corruption and abuse of power. The trial is expected to take place soon.