Legal Studies Major at Berkeley

[sunfish]

<p>Does it help or hurt law school admission?
What about law school preparation?</p>

[cherokeejew]

<p>It doesn’t matter for admissions, but if it did, it would be a negative. They like diversity of intellectual background and specifically discourage pre-law type majors.</p>

<p>Purely anecdotal of course, but it certainly doesn’t seem to help for the LSAT - I know exactly one Legal Studies major at Berkeley (he switched over from Math) and he only got a 169, despite a 1600 SAT.</p>

[theoneo]

<p>At Penn, Wharton has a concentration in Legal Studies & Business Ethics. Advisors strongly discourage pre-law students from pursuing it, with this justification taken from the website:</p>

<p>

Students considering going to law school should think twice before pursuing a Legal Studies and Business Ethics concentration for at least two reasons. First, an undergraduate concentration in Legal Studies and Business Ethics may not help a student’s chances of getting admitted to law school; admissions officers may prefer applicants whose transcripts show mastery of other fields. Second, law school in the United States consists of three years of intensive legal study, which tends to make previous undergraduate study superfluous. The Department therefore advises students interested in a professional legal career to take a broader range of courses during their undergraduate years at Wharton.

</p>

<p>With that said, I don’t know the nature of the program at Berkeley but I assume the superfluousness argument would still apply. And other posters have said that no matter what you do in undergrad, your experience will not be similar to what you’ll face in law school because their approaches to education are entirely different, so just major in what you want and get a strong GPA.</p>

[Student615]

<p>I have no disagreement with the advice given above, but I want to note one thing:</p>

<p>“Purely anecdotal of course, but it certainly doesn’t seem to help for the LSAT - I know exactly one Legal Studies major at Berkeley (he switched over from Math) and he only got a 169, despite a 1600 SAT.”</p>

<p>The guy scored in the **high 90’s<a href=“percentile-wise”>/b</a>. So if we’re going to generalize based on one guy, let’s recognize that 97-98% (or so) of prospective law students will be looking up to his score, not frowning on or discouraged by it. I know that you don’t actually intend to make a vast generalization here, but come on. This is just way too in-line with the poster who recently categorized a top-25 school as a “third tier toilet.” Oy.</p>

[ladistar]

<p>Please stop taking my words out of context. I didn’t say it was a bad school, just a non T-14 school hence a “TTT”. There’s nothing wrong with attending any kind of law school, so as long as you work hard and make the best of it. I know many of people who came from non t14 schools who are doing great right now, although a vast majority of students from t14s generally get the more prestigious biglaw jobs and clerkships. Does it mean that any school below that is bad? No. the bottom line is that TTT is just slang and shouldn’t be taken literally. Obviously only a select few students get to attend highly prestigious schools so does that automatically mean that every matriculating law student is doomed for failure? Of course not. </p>

<p>Don’t take things too seriously, man.</p>