Law school

A law school (also known as a school of law or college of law) is an institution specializing in legal education.

Contents 1 Law degrees 2 Controversies 3 Alternative legal education systems 4 List of law schools 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

Law degrees

Law schools in Canada and the United States typically require three years of study after completing an undergraduate degree. In other countries law is often studied as a first degree or combined with simultaneous study for another undergraduate degree.

Upon graduation from law school, students are awarded a professional degree, the Juris Doctor (J.D.) or Doctor of Law degree in the U.S. or the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.; or, from the University of Toronto and Queen's University, a J.D.) in common law Canada and Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L) in civil law Canada (Quebec) and some schools in Louisiana.

In England, Australia and other common law countries the law degree is usually an undergraduate qualification, with the LL.B being the most commonly awarded degree.

Some schools also offer a Master of Laws (LL.M.) program, offered as a way of specializing in a particular area of law. A further possible degree is the academic doctoral degree in law of Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) (in the U.S)., or the Doctorate of Laws (LL.D.) in Canada, or the Ph.D. in Law from European or Australasian universities.

In addition to attending law school, in many jurisdictions a graduate of a law school is required to pass the state or provincial bar examination in order to practice law. The Multistate Bar Examination is part of the bar examination in almost all United States jurisdictions; generally, the standardized, common law subject matter of the MBE is combined with state-specific essay questions to produce a comprehensive bar examination.

In other common law countries the bar exam is often replaced by a period of work with a law firm known as articles of clerkship.

In the U.S., law school typically involves a full time course of study, though there are part-time programs available. In Canada, part-time study is very rare.

On July 3, 2007, the Korean National Assembly passed legislation introducing 'Law School', closely modeled on the American post-graduate system.^[1]

Controversies

Recently, in the United States, critics have emerged questioning the forthrightness of some law schools in providing prospective students with accurate facts regarding alumni job- placement and compensation rates, suggesting that certain law schools may be distorting their statistics in order to attract students to their institutions.^[2] In particular, many law school graduates--particularly at lower-ranked schools--suggest that their schools utilized correct, but misleading, statistics to attract students. An example of this would be citing the mean graduate salary, instead of the median; while the median salary of law grads in the U.S. is approximately $62,000, the mean could be inflated somewhat by a relatively small concentration of graduates earning starting salaries well above the median.^[3] For example, the starting salary at nearly all large law firms in several cities across the country in 2008 is $160,000 plus bonus.^[4] Also, it is very likely that even median salary statistics are incorrect, since students who are unemployed, working temporary jobs or have a low salary are less likely to submit a salary report to the school.

A common response to this criticism, however, is that it simply reflects the reality of competitiveness in legal education and in the legal market. With a limited number of top positions available, prospective law students should be circumspect about the employment opportunities that will await them after graduation—especially if they plan on attending a lower-ranked school. At the same time, however, students at prestigious, highly regarded institutions often have a variety of options available. This discrepancy can be seen as a simple function of supply and demand, with the number of newer (and thus lower-ranked) law schools proliferating in recent years. A similar difficulty may be encountered by graduate students in other fields, although the aforementioned lack of accurate information about post-graduate employment may exacerbate the problem for law students.^[5]

Even when students are able to find jobs at the top-paying law firms, some say that minority law school graduates have difficulty advancing their careers. The law student organization Building a Better Legal Profession generated controversy for showing the lack of female and minority partners in large private firms. In an October 2007 press conference reported in the Wall Street Journal^[6] and the New York Times,^[7] the group released data publicizing the numbers of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans at America's top law firms. The group has sent the information to top law schools around the country, encouraging students to take this demographic data into account when choosing where to work after graduation.^[8] As more students choose where to work based on the firms' diversity rankings, firms face an increasing market pressure in order to attract top recruits.^[9]

As well, there has been some controversy regarding the stark increases in law school tuition in recent years, at a time when compensation packages in the legal services sector are growing much more slowly than the U.S. inflation rate.^[10]

Some attribute these issues to insufficient regulation of law schools by the American Bar Association. The total number of Juris Doctor degrees awarded has been on the rise in recent years, at least partially due to the accreditation of new schools by the ABA.^[11]

The United States continues to open new law schools at a time when it already has more than 1.2 million lawyers ^[12] Some states or cities have more lawyers than others. To become a licensed attorney in California, one need not have attended any kind of law school - much less an ABA approved law school. ^[13] Yet California has 20 law schools, with the opening of the UC-Irvine law school. There are 10 law schools in the Greater Chicago Area (Loyola, Depaul, NIU, U of IL, U. of Chicago, Notre Dame, IIT, John Marshall, Marquette, Valparaiso). Supply far outstripping demand, lawyers earn less and less. ^[14]

Alternative legal education systems

While law schools such as those in the U.S. and Canada are typically post-graduate institutions with considerable autonomy, legal education in other countries is provided within the mainstream educational system from university level and/or in non-degree conferring vocational training institutions. In countries such as the United Kingdom and most of continental Europe, academic legal education is provided within the mainstream university system starting at the undergraduate level, and the legal departments of universities are simply departments like any other rather than separate "law schools". In these countries, the term "law school" may be used, but it does not have the same clear cut meaning as it does in North America. There are also sometimes legal colleges that provide vocational training as a post-academic stage of legal education. One example is the College of Law in the United Kingdom, which provides certain professional qualifications which British lawyers must obtain before they may practice as solicitors or barristers but does not confer degrees. In Australia, law schools such as Sydney Law School and the UNSW Law School have emphasised a combination of the British and American systems, employing law as a degree, but done as a combined degree with that of another discipline. Whilst Melbourne University Law School recently scrapped Law as an undergraduate combined degree in favour of moving the discipline to graduate study.

List of law schools

Main article: Lists of law schools

See also

• Juris Doctor
• Legal education
• Legal education in the United Kingdom
• Madrasah
• Paralegal
• Law School Admissions Test

References

Further reading

• Duncan Kennedy: Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, New Edition, New York Univ Press, 2004, ISBN 0814747787

External links

• U.S. News Law School Rankings

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