Article about undergrad prep for law school

<p>I came across this article, "Optimizing Undergraduate Preparation for Law School", written by a pre-law advisor, and found it interesting. Do the law students and lawyers who read this thread agree with his advice?</p>

<p><a href="https://legacy.touro.edu/advisement/PrelawAdvisement%5COptimizing%20Undergraduate%20Preparation%20for%20Law%20School.pdf"&gt;https://legacy.touro.edu/advisement/PrelawAdvisement%5COptimizing%20Undergraduate%20Preparation%20for%20Law%20School.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>It should not take 16 pages to say “get a good GPA and do well on the LSAT.”</p>

<p>In all seriousness, no, the article is mostly just silly. For example, those law “bootcamps” are worthless. The stated proof that they’re valuable, that some law schools comp the programs or that the programs provide some schools discounts, are nonsensical. Those are economic arrangements and have nothing to do with law school performance. They couldn’t possibly, since law school is graded on a curve. No matter how much or how little a class prepares, there will still be only 10% in the top 10%. </p>

<p>The author is also wrong in saying that better prepared students do better. Counter-intuitively, those who come in fresh are often at an advantage. No class is long enough to teach the full breadth of a subject. That means you need to know what your given professor thinks is important. If you want to law bootcamp and they taught you all about the UCC, but your professor is a fanatic about the Restatement, you have an awful lot to unlearn before you can even start learning what you need. This is one reason why you take specific bar prep. What parts of the law different testers care about varies.</p>

<p>I have no idea why the author thinks undergraduates should read law review articles. No one cares about law review articles.</p>

<p>The author is right that you definitely want to practice writing a law exam. The author is wrong in thinking you can do this before you learn the law. You don’t practice algebra tests before you’ve learned algebra for a very good reason: you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not an accident that the author “forgets” to tell undergraduates how they’re supposed to learn issue spotting. It’s way easier to tell them to do an impossible task than it is to explain how to go about it.</p>

<p>The author’s point about legal research isn’t true because legal research is really easy. I had a job doing legal research before I went to law school. I was no better than any of my compatriots by the time it came to turn in our first paper. Most decent schools don’t even grade LRW so there’s plenty of time to learn it properly.</p>

<p>Then the author says that political science is the best major for prepping for law school. On a hunch, I looked him up. The author is a political science professor. Who’s surprised?</p>

<p>Get good grades and do great on LSAT: enough said. </p>

<p>utterly ridiculous – the author is inconsistent in his approach.</p>

<p>Rec 1: read law reviews.

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<p>Exactly.</p>

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<p>Does he mean 1 vs. none? More importantly, even if its two law review articles, there is absolutely no undergrad college prof that will teach/grade the same as a LS prof. Heck, the LS prof might even radically disagree with the conclusions. (Dean Chem may have writhed the go-to tome for Con Law, but hundreds to top law school Profs are members of the Federalist Society and disagree with Dean Chem’s conclusions.) Much better to learn from the Prof who is going to be grading your one and only essay.</p>

<p>Rec 2: resolving problems of legal interpretation</p>

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<p>I would submit that Organic Chem teaches analytical skills thousands of times better than any Poli Sci course.</p>

<p>Rec 3: answering questions on issue-spotting exams.</p>

<p>Doesn’t exist in the undergraduate world. Why would it?</p>

<p>Rec 4: interactive argumentation and debate</p>

<p>yeah, sure, tell that to the large public Unis, with 1000 students in a class.</p>

<p>Rec 5: conducting legal research</p>

<p>I’m a fan of a liberal arts eduction in undergrad – not a vocational one.</p>

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<p>There, I fixed his conclusion.</p>