Law School and Law Study
Some background, first:
Becoming a Lawyer
Law School
The first step in becoming a lawyer in the United States is attending law school. In many other countries, law is an undergraduate major, but here it’s a three-year graduate degree.
The first year varies remarkably little between schools: contracts, civil procedure, torts, criminal law, and property. Some schools require constitutional law as well, and some allow students to choose an elective at one point. My law school required all the courses I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph (two terms of the first two and one of each of the last three) and allowed us to choose one elective our second term, all of which related to an area of law governed more by statutes than by prior cases.
Students will also generally need to take a course in legal writing and research. At Hastings, we did this our first term and took a moot court course in our second. (Moot court is much like it sounds–you get a case, usually one that’s pending before the United States Supreme Court or the highest court in the state where the school is located, are randomly assigned a side to argue, and spend a unit or two’s worth of time researching, briefing, and arguing it.)
In the second year, students pretty much get to take what they want. Some schools (including Hastings) don’t require con law and evidence, but you’d be a fool not to take them, especially as they’re covered on the bar exam, more on which later.
The third year, at Hastings at least, is much the same from a formal standpoint. Some schools (such as George Washington, I’m informed) take a page from medical schools’ books and have an entirely clinical third year–students work under the tutelage of experienced attorneys or judges assisting them in their duties. It remains to be seen whether this will become standard practice, but clinical programs are becoming more common and prominent in the American law-school landscape. For my part, I spent half my time my last semester of law school working for a judge at the San Francisco Superior Court. If you’re in law school, I strongly recommend it.
“Reading law”
Of course, you could go the seriously old-school route and not bother with law school at all, instead taking a period of apprenticeship to an attorney or judge and studying under them. This used to be the only way to become a lawyer, but it’s far less common these days–most states don’t even allow it, but California is one that does.
Add comment June 7th, 2008
