<p>Hello, I got into both Williams and Amherst and my career plans involve getting into a good law school. Which college is stronger for aspiring lawyers? Which has a more involved pre-law society?</p>
<p>The difference between Amherst and Williams in this regard is de minimus. Insignificant. Not worthy of consideration.</p>
<p>And, by the way: when you go to apply to law school, you will discover that, with few exceptions (e.g., being a URM, or doing Teach for America, plus a few other attractive accomplishments), law school is all about the numbers. “Soft” factors are not much of a consideration. Law school admissions are all about the GPA/LSAT combination (relative weighting of each varies by individual law school).</p>
<p>For more information, go to Top-Law-Schools.com. Very helpful forum.</p>
<p>FWIW, Amherst has a “Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought” (LJST) major which <em>some</em> people might consider a pre-law program, but, Amherst itself doesn’t refer to it that way and, in fact, most top law schools discourage the idea of a pre-law track at the undergraduate level. Piglette is correct; all things being equal (lsat scores, gpa, number of applicants, etc.) neither school has a clear advantage over the other in law school admissions.</p>
<p>[Williams</a> College Law Society | This is the online home of the Williams College Law Society](<a href=“http://williamscollegelawsociety.com/]Williams”>http://williamscollegelawsociety.com/)</p>
<p>There is also a “legal studies” concentration at Williams to take in addition to a major (or two), but in general, Williams faculty aren’t interested in give students vocational preparation. You might be better off browsing the English, history, philosophy, poli sci, economics, etc. department pages, or even the pages for Latino studies, Asian studies, etc. to see what kind of approach you’d like to take to make your own pre-law experience. I’m thinking that might help you better distinguish between the two schools. I’m not pre-law though, so you might be better off trying the “contact” page of the above website!</p>
<p>I did notice that Yale did not have anyone from Amherst in its most recent class profile.
However, I think there really is no difference between the two in this regard. You should go to the institution that will be best to help you flourish intellectually and as a person. I was also accepted to both institutions (and some Ivies), but I went with Amherst.</p>
<p>The two schools are equal.</p>
<p>However, I would think long and hard about going to law school in the first place.</p>
<p>There is a vast oversupply of lawyers.</p>
<p>But you don’t have to worry about that for a long time.</p>
<p>@floridadad55: C’mon, I hear people say that we do not have enough lawyers all the time!</p>
<p>Okay, that was sarcasm. Personally, I am aiming for law school as part of a career in politics.</p>
<p>There are way too many lawyers in politics!</p>
<p>Haha, I respectfully disagree.
The number of lawyers going into politics took a substantial downturn during the aughts. Besides, I think we could use some more educated people in Congress, not including Penn State of course ;)</p>
<p>My D started law school and said the kind of education involves such tunnel vision that she concluded that gov’t is so bad because it is run by lawyers. I know that isn’t entirely the case, and I know many extremely intelligent and kindly lawyers, but she felt the way lawyers are educated does not train them to look at the big picture.</p>
<p>My field is literature and we do look at the big picture. Of course, we have no power.</p>
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<p>I’d say there are way too many politicians in law</p>
<p>Hey, I was also accepted to Amherst and I’m planning to do the Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought major. While participating in this program would not improve my chances to get accepted to an elite law school, it will be a great base for my future studies there. Williams and Amherst are pretty much identically strong in terms of academics. But Williams does not have a pre-law program what-so-ever. In my opinion, it would be much easier for me to succeed academically in a demanding law school after Amherst’s pre-law program.</p>
<p>@vbpost: Here’s an excerpt from the LJST section of the Amherst course catalog. </p>
<p>Post-Graduate Study. LJST is not a pre-law program designed to serve the needs of those contemplating careers in law. While medical schools have prescribed requirements for admission, there is no parallel in the world of legal education. </p>
<p>Law schools generally advise students to obtain a broad liberal arts education; they are as receptive to students who major in physics, mathematics, history or philosophy as they would be to students who major in LJST.</p>
<p>LJST majors will be qualified for a wide variety of careers. Some might do graduate work in legal studies, others might pursue graduate studies in political science, history, philosophy, sociology, or comparative literature. </p>
<p>For those LAW, JURISPRUDENCE, AND SOCIAL THOUGHT not inclined toward careers in teaching and scholarship, LJST would prepare students for work in the private or public sector or for careers in social service.</p>
<p>Just thought you should read that.</p>
<p>I am not a law school adcom, but I am a lawyer and a hiring partner at a major firm, and I must say choosing between two excellent colleges based on speculation of which gives you a better chance of getting into law school is just silly. If you go where you enjoy, you will do better, and therefore, if at the end of 4 years you still want law school, you’ll be in a better position to get in. In fact, if you wanted to be so narrow minded as to base your college decision on the speculation of what strategy might work best to get into law school, it may be that graduating at the very top of your class at your state’s flagship university (where you will presumably face less competition and hence pull down better grades) and acing the LSAT, is the most effective strategy. Law school admissions is cold and number driven. Enjoy college. Choose based on a criteria of where you will thrive for the next four years, and then all else will follow.</p>
<p>and to the person who said law school is like tunnel vision, that is true, at least for the first year and maybe the second. undergrad is a mind expanding experience. law school? not so much. but law school is not the liberal arts. It is a trade school. If you want to be a lawyer, you have to learn the nuts and bolts, no way around it. If you can’t sit through the mind numbing experience of digesting tomes of contract, real property and tort law, this is not the field for you – Your clients do have an expectation that you will know this stuff!</p>
<p>Too many people in my HLS class chose law school as the path of least resistance-- they didn’t want to enter the workforce and they didn’t want to do a PhD so they saw law school as just more of their Gov concentration or whatever. Then lo and behold they discover that law school has at its purpose to train student to be…lawyers. And they don’t want to practice law so they are distraught. (I heard the dean of the Law School once correct a student who said that the students were clients of the Law School. “Oh, no” He pointed out, “you aren’t the clients, you are the product…” Once I understood that so many things that heretofore made no sense fell into place.)</p>
<p>Maybe Yale is a 3 year trip into white-letter nirvana but that is about it. Harvard, Stanford and all of the rest of the law schools want to create lawyers. Now what you choose to do as a lawyer is no longer the small list of things such as private practice, government or in house counsel, but still and all-- you will be going to a trade school as Pickwick rightly points out. If that does not appeal-- there are other ways to spend 3 years and a couple of hundred (once you put in living costs too) thousand bucks.</p>
<p>It just my opinion, but I think it will be useful to learn before graduation from the college what “Venue, Plaintiff, Jurat and Chattel” mean.</p>
<p>^^^^^You can watch Law and Order.</p>
<p>My DD lived through one year of law school and quit for the reasons given. She is now starting a graduate program in history, and is already working with the prof who works on legal history.</p>
<p>I am a pile of anxiety, but she made a wise choice for her. Her main interest in the law is in ending the death penalty. To that end she interned at Georgia Capital Defenders for a year, but she is a New Yorker and doesn’t really want to live in death penalty states. </p>
<p>I am babbling. Forgive me. I am merely supporting Pickwick’s ideas as seconded by etondad.</p>
<p>My Williams son changed his major midstream and is now successfully pursuing a new field. He has gotten himself into a grad program in a field in which he took only two courses while at Williams, but the atmosphere of Williams is directly responsible for him finding his niche, and luckily it something at which he excels.</p>
<p>So to the OP, you can’t know where you’ll end up, but even if you do, Williams and Amherst are fraternal twins. Amherst is actually a Williams’ offshoot, and though the schools have parted company in some ways, they still have a lot in common.</p>
<p>As someone who went to Williams and was good friends with an LJST major from Amherst while at law school, I can safely say that neither school provides any particular advantage over the other in terms of law school preparation, nor does any particular area of substantive knowledge. Many of the people I know who performed best in law school were math and science majors as undergrads. Success in law school (which is only tangentially related to success as an attorney, by the way) is all about rigorous, analytical thinking. Basically any major (but some more than most, I bet any astrophysics major from Williams, for example, would kick butt in law school) at these schools will be a great preparation for law school. Whether that major is substantively related to law is totally irrelevant. I (and my friend from Amherst) certainly felt like we were ahead of the curve early in our first year, before others from larger schools caught up.</p>
<p>Just to go along with what Ephman said, I have read that mathematics and economics majors perform best on the LSAT, which makes sense considering the questions.
So a specific major that would be most beneficial for pre-law might be mathematical.</p>
<p>" It just my opinion, but I think it will be useful to learn before graduation from the college what Venue, Plaintiff, Jurat and Chattel mean."</p>
<p>to VBpost - personally I didn’t know what a single one of those words meant. I didn’t even know what a “tort” was (a fruit pastry perhaps?) when I entered law school and still graduated at the top of my class from a top national school. That stuff is just memorization it requires many hours, but not skill. The harder part, as others have pointed out, is learning to think like a lawyer a logical sequence of deductive thinking that is beat into you during lawschool. This I believe comes naturally to people well fitted to be lawyers, and it is honed by any number of undergrad degrees from philosophy to engineering to literature, as may suit your taste.</p>