What's the difference between a Pre-Law Major and law school?

Dustyfeathers
Sun, 22 Nov 2015 19:27:47 +0000

From a US law school perspective, there’s a lot more to a law career than just knowing laws. Law is a big umbrella over many subject areas. There’s law related to any kind of discipline you can probably imagine: environmental law and global warming issues (such as entire island countries disappearing because of rising seas: what legally happens to these people who aren’t responsible for the disaster happening to them? Or desertification of areas and displaced peoples), patents, cross-border litigation and arbitration, the arts and entertainment (provenance of art work, contracts for Beyonce, etc.), copyright and intellectual property, gender issues, immigration, real estate, you name it. People attend law school in the US who are already engineers, physicians, chemist, Chinese or Italian scholars–or combinations of the above. They also attend directly after a BA.

If you want to do law in the US, get a BA in whatever interests you and then work in a law firm–but not as a lawyer. You can start in undergrad volunteering for public interest law-related organizations, such as government agencies, prisoner legal services, foreclosure volunteer attorney organizations, environmental advocacy, gender-rights advocacy, reproductive rights advocacy, child advocacy, health advocacy (AIDS or Hep B for example) or work as a paralegal for a law firm, etc.

If you show 1) excellent undergraduate grades (A average); 2) score in the 98th-99th percentile for your LSAT; and 3) show a track record of work in the sort of law that you’d like to eventually do, you will have a better chance of getting into a top law school. Starting salaries of corporate attorneys in NYC directly out of law school start at $160K currently. Top law schools place above 90% of graduates in law-related jobs. Public interest starts from about $40-70K, sometimes higher. A top law school will also have loan forgiveness for PI law careers.