Which Classes Should I Take in College to Prepare for Law School?
When you send in your applications, law school admissions officers will see all your higher education transcripts, compiled by LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service (CAS). Law schools will focus on your grades, but their picture of you as an applicant encompasses more than your numbers.
Law school admissions officers will also take notice of anything unusual in your academic record, good or bad, including which classes you take. They want to see courses that provide useful preparation for law school and demonstrate your interest in law.
Types of Classes to Prepare for Law School
To be clear, maintaining a high cumulative grade point average (GPA) is more important than the specific classes you take. It is best to take classes that fit your talents and interests, so that you can perform your best while taking on a challenging course load. Still, classes in the following subjects can help show you have what it takes to succeed in law school.
Research-Oriented
Law schools know that to be an effective lawyer, you must be a great researcher. Research skills are crucial to legal practice, because common law requires deep research and critical analysis of findings.
Build research skills in fields like social science and humanities. Whether or not your research is related to the law, make sure to showcase it on your resume, essays, and transcript.
History and Government
Knowing the workings of American government through a mix of local, state, and federal institutions, norms, and laws provides a solid foundation for law school classes. Because the American legal system is based on precedent, with current cases referring to past jurisprudence, understanding the historic context for past cases is crucial to assessing each case’s relevance.
Besides choosing courses like the U.S. Constitution and American politics, you should also consider courses that view the American experience from alternative lenses. You can focus that lens narrowly on a specific region or topic or widen it to a broader theme like international relations or comparative politics. Ethnic or cultural studies or related fields like the history of art, architecture, science, or medicine may help put historical trends into perspective.
Social Science
Social science methods are becoming increasingly crucial to U.S. law, so their mastery can be helpful to legal study and practice. Examples of subjects applicable to law school include economics, sociology, political science, criminology, and psychology.
Data Science and Statistics
Frankly, most lawyers tend to avoid STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). However, statistical methods are now integral to modern legal practice. By knowing the applications and blind spots of data-based approaches, you will be better protected against erroneous arguments that deploy statistical methods based on bad data, which can easily intimidate untrained readers.
Similarly, mathematics and engineering courses can help with cases in important legal fields like technology, environmental, and health care law. It can even be a prerequisite for certain fields like patent law.
Communications and Close Reading
Advocacy or activism can also help prepare you for your career in law, as lawyers must communicate well and articulate ideas persuasively. Because law schools want candidates who can closely read and analyze text to support their arguments, textual analysis is one of the key skills tested by the LSAT.
Whether through English or foreign literature, religious studies or history, all kinds of textual analysis build skills in critical thinking and argumentation. Lawyers must quickly familiarize themselves with new fields as demanded by their legal cases. Try to cultivate intellectual versatility by taking challenging humanities classes like philosophy or cultural studies.
Writing a Thesis or Research Paper
Serious academic projects and papers demonstrate to admissions officers that you have the research and writing skills to succeed in law school. Your academic work and history, including any thesis or final year projects, matter as well. Major academic projects are great for your law school application because they show that you are a self-motivated and goal-oriented person with strong research and writing skills.
[Next Read: Reading and Writing Skills That Will Help You Succeed in Law School]
Why Are These Classes Important?
In the long run, the skills you gain in these classes will be useful to your legal career. The life of a lawyer can be impossibly busy, especially when you’re just starting out. A new lawyer will be expected to juggle multiple projects at once, most of which will have fixed deadlines. Pursuing a challenging and diverse courseload demonstrates efficient time management and project management skills.
Further, building a relationship with a professor in these fields is critical because law school applications require at least one letter of recommendation from a faculty member. Taking classes that involve discussion, research, and writing will give professors a clear sense of your strengths and weaknesses so that they can speak about your potential with conviction and firsthand knowledge. Plus, forming a personal connection with a professor can be one of the most meaningful parts of the college experience.
A thesis, research project, or challenging class can also be a great topic for a law school interview. Presumably, it’s something you know a lot about. The specialized expertise or insights you worked hard to gain may be more interesting to your interviewer than most small talk.
What About Prelaw Majors?
If your college offers a prelaw or legal studies major or minor, by all means take it. But don’t worry if that’s not an available option, because few U.S. colleges offer such programs.
With a few narrow exceptions like accelerated “3+3” programs, U.S. legal education typically starts after college. This may sound strange to readers in other countries where legal education tracks start early. However, the fact that anyone can become a lawyer regardless of their undergraduate focus brings a variety of perspectives to law school classrooms and legal practice.
Arguably, this is a unique strength of the U.S. legal education system. Unlike in law school, where many of the classes cover fairly narrow and technical legal issues, as a college student you can enroll in a variety of classes that expand the window through which you perceive the world. The classes you take might shape your career in profound and surprising ways. After all, lawyers play a critical regulatory role on all kinds of issues.
[Next Read: The Best Extracurricular Activities for Your Law School Application]
