@FloridaLaw2020: Tuition at Stetson runs about $42,000 per year. University of Miami tuition is over $49,000 per year.
FSU & Florida charge about $22,000 per year tuition.
No need to pay full tuition at Stetson or Miami.
Additional advice: take an LSAT review course. You’ve got a great GPA, and with a great LSAT you’ll find you’ve got many well-deserved options when it comes to applying to and paying for law school.
@Publisher: While majoring in criminology won’t likely affect law school chances (except insofar as there’s causation with the LSAT), employers are likely to notice. Civil employers in particular may ask why someone majored in criminology and now wants civil employment. That’s a factor that should be weighed when selecting a new major.
@Demosthenes49 : Interesting point. Also worth noting is that law firms often consider whether one can speak the language & understand the concerns of their business clients.
To be clear, criminology is a great major for one seeking a position in law enforcement, but does not usually develop the skills needed for law school success or for the successful practice of law.
But that is what most lawyers do. Add in ‘attending meetings’ and you’ve got the day of most lawyers down. Even litigators don’t spend that much time with clients. Even divorce attorneys spend more time with the paperwork of the clients than they do with the actual client.
DAs and public defenders may have more interaction with clients. Not all those interactions are fun
It’s clear that criminology isn’t getting much(any?) love here, but gotta disagree:
- It’s an established branch of sociology; it’s not criminal justice or crime scene investigator or other technical major. a true criminology major is a blend of social and behavioral science, akin to psychology, but arguably more closely related to anthropology.
2… No idea where the “but does not usually develop the skills needed for law school success or for the successful practice of law” comes from; is there any objective authority for this opinion? That would be like saying having a degree in civil engineering prevents on from doing anything but patent law-or more specifically prevents one from being a prosecutor, as it isn’t a related degree. And based on my experience-working as a prosecutor for years, and years spent in criminal defense-it isn’t accurate. We had folks with degrees in Spanish, and they did just fine in litigation. - I worked as a TA for a criminology professor in college; his other gig was as a professor at the (T-14) law school teaching…criminology.
- No matter what the law job, you will spend a lot of time in the office, reviewing papers. As an ADA, you will spend a lot of time in court, but not a lot of it is intellectually challenging or interesting or in any way engaging. A day or two doing probation revocations would be a good way for someone to see what things are really like as an ADA(and to a lesser extent, PD). But that’s being a lawyer; it’s not like TV, but it is a job and depending where you end up, there is a chance to do trial work, if that’s what you want.
Agree that if you want to do a lot of trial work, then practice as an Assistant DA or as a Public Defender should be considered. If so, then majoring in Spanish will greatly enhance your resume & job opportunities in these practice areas. Also agree that if you want to be an ADA or PD that majoring in criminology will not matter as PD’s need demonstrated interest & becoming an ADA in most jurisdictions is not difficult–but the pay is quite low.
@crankyoldman: Your most recent post was helpful in gaining an understanding of your perspective. Regardless, criminology is not good prep for law school or the practice of law as there is little demand/need for analytical thought & critical reading & writing skills in what is considered to be an easy major course of study. Also, google LSAT results by major and you should discover that criminology majors score the lowest among all majors considered–and the list of majors is extensive.
Hmmm…“becoming an ADA in most jurisdictions is not difficult”. Sorry to disagree, but that just isn’t accurate. On any given year, we had 10 law clerks who had been with the office (usually) since the beginning of second year. They were all hard-working dedicated women and men, and most years all passed the bar the first time. My office never hired more than three for entry level positions, even though all 10 were greatly appreciated by us ADAs. Why? Because there were so many experienced attorneys willing to come work for entry level pay. So not sure what jurisdiction you practice in, but for me this has been the case consistently.
I have risen to the level of resume reviewer/who to hire decider. We routinely post entry level jobs and get a blizzard of new grads-and many other attorneys with some to much experience. This has become the regular response, so again, not sure where getting ADA jobs is easy.
Regarding Spanish as a major-great idea, but has zero relationship to the law; we had people who had anthropology and art history and all sorts of degrees. Based on the above, these degrees would disqualify one from being a ADA or PD, and that just isn’t the case.
And to address a concern, I’ve met plenty of people with engineering degrees who are lawyers; I had several classmates who were engineers(no idea why law school, but never really asked). If you major in engineering of any type, you will do little of the “critical reading” you mention, and will do nothing in the way of developing “writing skills” either. Analytical thought? Perhaps, but related to engineering only. You learn to write like a lawyer in law school, and in fact legal writing is its own specialty.
Again, no idea where or what type of law you practice, but reviewing LSAT scores doesn’t reflect practice-or success. I’ve seen the list-engineers and physics/math major are at the top of the list-and these majors do little or no critical writing or reading, as related to law, at all. These majors do well because these people are smart.
So a smart sociology major with great GPA and LSAT score, would be a rare bird indeed, highly prized by law schools.
Don’t understand your last sentence–at least based on my posts in this thread.
Spanish proficiency/fluency is widely sought by DA’s offices & PD’s offices in many–probably most–jurisdictions in the continental US.
All posted positions for attorneys get boatloads of resumes due to supply & demand in the market for lawyers.
Also, the reason that DA’s offices hire fewer than all of their capable law school clerks tends to be due to a lack of funding.
Well, now I’m confused.
So you agree it isn’t easy to get a ADA job?
And you’re missing the point about Spanish-yes, we had a couple of Spanish majors but a ton of poli sci majors; neither got to use their skills, such as they were, in court at any point. They learned what they needed in law school, as clerks, and on the job.
Where do you practice? What is your experience as an ADA or PD?
It is not easy to get any job which requires a JD and bar membership due to oversupply of lawyers.
ADA positions are great for trial experience which has become too expensive for most clients in the private sector. Also, aspiring politicians often seek ADA positions to bolster their future candidacy.
You misunderstand the need for Spanish fluency/proficiency in the criminal court process. Court proceedings in the US are conducted in English, and occasionally with court certified interpreters for witness testimony if the witness needs an interpreter. Spanish is used in the pretrial process of witness & defendant interviews.
P.S. I have to log off now, but I think that there is little use in continuing our discussion as experience is the best teacher & your experience has resulted in different understandings than mine which is understandable based upon different populations in different jurisdictions.
26 "becoming an ADA in most jurisdictions is not difficult"
31 "It is not easy to get any job which requires a JD and bar membership due to oversupply of lawyers."
Glad we agree on something.
And no, I don’t misunderstand the need for Spanish proficiency; I’ve run whole dockets with one Spanish language interpreter after another, because none of the defendants spoke English as their first language. And obviously, foreign language proficiency can be helpful-but majoring in a foreign language entails none of the writing or critical reading/analysis you said were required to succeed as an attorney.
Never stated that it did. Only noted that it is a sought after qualification in the screening & hiring process.
Some law school admissions information: http://schools.lawschoolnumbers.com/
Some law school employment outcomes information: https://www.lstreports.com/schools/
How would you know that it is “a sought after qualification in the screening & hiring process”; do you participate in hiring attorneys?
From the ABA website:
http://www.abarequireddisclosures.org/
A foreign language major doesn’t just learn a language, it is a literature major, similar to majoring in English.
Personally, I think Spanish-or studying any foreign language-is a great major. But this goes against the CW so oftern embraced on this forum, that the student needs “analytic” and “critical thinking” and that philosophy is the best major; this is nonsense. What’s the most important thing for success in foreign language study? Precision. What do you want in a lawyer? Precision. And it’s what both clients and the courts expect from lawyers.
I majored in English; we spent countless hours dissecting Shakespeare’s sonnets and parsing Spencer’s The Fairie Queen. We were required to write exegesis after exegesis about Milton’s Paradise Lost. And none of these experiences helped one iota when it came to legal writing, which is unique and not even vaguely related to other professional writing.
Foreign language study encourages precise use of language and structure, exactly the sorts of things a lawyer needs when drafting pleadings.
I would major in whatever you would choose if you were not considering law school, the major that would be your Plan B. In addition to hedging against the uncertainty of the future, in my opinion, this makes a candidate more interesting, multi-dimensional, possessing a wider perspective.