Pre-Law Seminar

Class #1: The Basic Basics

Pre-Reading

Nobody told me the basic basics before I started on the path to law school.
You may know some of this stuff – but I’ll guarantee you don’t know all of
it, so we’re going to cover it. This pre-reading is meant to be very
straightforward, and then we’re going to take it apart in Class #1.

Before Law School

American law schools require a college degree or something like it, but
don’t require any particular major. While it’s common to major in
something that feels law-related like Political Science, law schools value
science majors (patent and tech-literate lawyers are in demand) and those
who have done unusual things like music or classics or art. Taking hard
classes is far better than taking easy ones – law school admissions officers
know the difference. Law school is hard so they’re looking for people who
can get A’s in hard classes, not just the easy stuff.

Law schools generally require a college transcript and an LSAT score for
admission, though a few law schools are starting to accept the GRE.
Prepping for the LSAT has become a cottage industry, and students do
tend to do quite a bit better on the LSAT if they prepare for it. There are
free LSAT prep options, ones that are cheap, and ones that are expensive.
Put some real thought and research into how to approach this and work
with your pre-law advisor on it. Doing well on the LSAT is essential to
getting into a competitive law school, and often influences financial aid
awards.

In some (perhaps most) other countries, law is something you can major
in in college, then you have an apprenticeship and some sort of bar exam
and you’re a lawyer. (In those countries law can usually be studied as a
graduate degree too, so there are both options.) The system doesn’t
generally look like it does in the USA, though Canada’s system is actually
very similar to ours. (In fact, Canada’s system takes even longer.)

In Law School
Law schools in the USA are pretty similar to one another because they are
all approved by the ABA and so have to meet its standards. Law school is
three years long (or, with a year-round program, could be two years and
change – Northwestern offers this but it’s not that popular for various
reasons).

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The first year of classes are generally prescribed in a set core curriculum
(see below) and the second and third years are largely or entirely elective
courses. Those electives are chosen from a reasonably constrained set of
options so that by the end of law school most folks have taken a somewhat
similar curriculum.

Here’s what the first year looks like at UChicago, for example – and this
would be reasonably typical for most American law schools:

The second and third years of law school include classes like
Environmental Law, Administrative Law, Constitutional Law (many
different classes in this category), Admiralty Law, Corporations (several
different classes in this category), Securities, American Indian Law, Legal
History, Antitrust, Family Law, Intellectual Property (several different
classes in this category), Secured Transactions, Corporate Finance, Tax,
Insurance, Bankruptcy, Energy Law, Jurisprudence, Evidence, Remedies,
Federal Jurisdiction, Criminal Procedure, Immigration, Trial Practice and
several more. It’s not possible to take them all; whether to specialize or
spread yourself out across the topics is an important decision – there isn’t
a right answer for everyone here, but my personal view based on watching
lawyers’ subsequent careers is that students who are confident of their
interest areas should go as deep and wide in those areas as they can. Don’t
take Indian Law if you’re going to be a Securities lawyer.

Some common things that happen in law school:

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 • Student legal clinics in which students get to do real legal work
for real clients under the supervision of a professor. Different law
school clinics have different areas of work they tend to focus on.
• Moot court, in which students argue cases (usually appellate
cases, usually ones that are currently pending before some Circuit
Court or the Supreme Court) in a competition; someone wins.
• Law review, wherein student editors turn out a quarterly law
journal consisting largely of articles by faculty from various law
schools. It’s generally regarded as an honorific to “be on law
review”, and making it onto law review often has to do with
having high grades – but not always. There are also sometimes
other student-edited journals at the school.
• Summers are for getting internships, clerkships or some sort of
law-related work that will help you decide what law to practice
- and perhaps pay you something.

After Law School

Once you graduate from law school, you are not a lawyer – except in
Wisconsin, where you might be.

In the other 49 states, you still need to take the bar exam. Bar exams are
generally two to three days long and offered in late July and late February.
This allows students graduating in May or December to have two months
or so to prepare for the exam, and prepare they do. Like LSAT prep, there
is a cottage industry devoted to bar exam review – e.g., BAR/BRI. It’s
expensive but worth it, and if you study you will pass, particularly in
relatively easier states like Minnesota – around 80% of people pass the
Minnesota bar at each sitting. California and New York and a few others
are notoriously harder and have lower bar passage rates. Bar exams vary
from state to state, but they aren’t ultimately that different. Minnesota
tests the following subjects:

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It is common and, in most lawyers’ views, desirable to clerk for a judge
after law school. Getting a clerkship is competitive, but former clerks all
seem to agree that it’s a great personal and professional experience and
well worth the time and effort. Clerkships are usually one or two years
and they don’t pay terribly well, but loans can usually be deferred during
the period of the clerkship. If your grades in law school make a clerkship
possible, you should probably try to do one.

Practicing Law I
Few lawyers are generalists any more. Lawyers practice in one or another
area, so while law school and the Bar Exam force you to learn across a wide
swathe of legal areas, the actual practice of law is likely to keep you in a
narrower space. The broadest practice is probably general litigation,
which at some firms could have you working across a wide range of legal
issues. More often, a lawyer is focused on one area of the law in his or her
practice.

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To imagine the range of what law practice could look like, see the table of
contents below for a book listing out many of the major legal specialties:

Practicing Law II
When one imagines practicing law, one often thinks of a law firm –
representing private parties. Here are some other things to think about.
The government has a lot of lawyers – perhaps they represent the
government’s interests, like in the office of the attorney general of
Minnesota. Or perhaps they are regulating an industry in a particular
area: like the Environmental Protection Agency, Securities & Exchange
Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, or the state agencies
that do the same things. There are in-house lawyers who work as
employees of companies representing those companies. Most often these
lawyers have worked somewhere else first (law firm or government

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agency), but not always. There are other jobs in law these days, like
working for Thomson Reuters who own Westlaw and employ many
lawyers, or working for a legal technology company or other company
that provides services to the legal sector.

How Different Are Other Countries?

Law is quite similar from one country to the next, though preparation for
becoming a lawyer will differ in some particulars. For example, see below
the list of courses for a law degree through Oxford University in the UK:

Now, England is the mother ship of the common law, so we might expect
similarity of topics between UK, USA, Canada, Australia etc. – but topics
tend to be similar even outside of common law jurisdictions. In fact, if you
were to take a class in Roman law, it would cover a lot of the same topics.
There are some timeless issues humans tend to run into that have to be
dealt with through the law, so legal systems do tend to have a fair bit in
common.

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In practice, you can go to law school in another country and still become
a lawyer in the USA if you like – usually with one year spent at an
American law school before taking an American bar exam. It is
commonplace for foreign lawyers to come to an American law school to
get a Masters in Law, allowing them to take an American bar exam and
practice law – usually international commercial law of some kind, and
most often in New York, LA, Miami or a few other international-focused
cities.

One can also get an American law degree and practice law outside the
USA – often London or in Asia, usually commercial law of some kind. See
an interesting example here (he went to the wrong college, but otherwise
is a great example of a really interesting international career).