What Really Is A Law School?

Most law students assume, given the common belief that law school is hard and that going through it will leave you physically and mentally drained, that it is going to be an exacting experience. Much of this is overstated and misplaced and if you start your law school experience on such assumptions you will probably be carrying a lot of unnecessary baggage that you should discard. It is undoubtedly tough, it is demanding and it will call for a lot of your time and labor, but it is doable, fulfilling and at the end of it, should result in a great career.

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Formal legal training is a relatively recent development. For centuries, would-be lawyers learned their trade by serving as apprentices or clerks to practicing attorneys. Finally, the legal profession accepted the idea of formal training and a law school curriculum began to develop. Various methods of teaching were tested. Some were discarded; others were re-tained and modified. The variety of assignments and activities in law school reflects this incremental and experimental growth of legal education.

Law school is an academic experience unlike any other. Initially it may resemble other academic pursuits because its goal—a complete restructuring of the mind's problem-solving approach—is accomplished by long hours of reading, studying, analyzing, and questioning. However, law school does not merely equip students with formula into which various practical problems are inserted like so many mathematical variables.

Mastery of the "substantive rules of law" is only the beginning—the student must develop the analytical ability to stretch existing rules in order to accommodate new sets of facts. A professor will of course want his students to learn the "black-letter rules." But he will be more concerned with training students to respond creatively to real-world legal problems that have no ready answers.

Basically all law schools are alike in some way or the other. The syllabus is fairly is consistent and unvarying as it must conform to the requirements of the American Bar Association. Education is generalized and broad based and specialization comes only later after graduation.

Law school may not inevitably be harder to tackle intellectually than college but the workload is definitely more and the level of proficiency expected by the professors is certainly more. What’s more, since everybody, especially during the first year is studying the same material; there is an increased sense of competition and rivalry.

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Before you decide to take the plunge and enter a law school, please understand that the study of law entails foregoing relaxed and causal attitudes and putting in a lot of time, effort and money. The course is paying but it demands a lot of perseverance and hard work. To be really successful you must put aside all other pursuits and focus and give attention exclusively to your courses.

But eventually, whether you should join a law school or not, boils down to you. It is a matter of personal choice. The eventual accountability rests with you. Experts can tell you what it entails and provide you information about what you will require to get admission into the law school of your choice. However, experts cannot tell you, if you will enjoy the experience, whether you will enjoy studying law, whether you will end up becoming a good lawyer or even if you will find the dream job that you have been contemplating throughout your years at law school – it is you who will provide the answers to these questions.

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