If you decide to become a lawyer, the time to start thinking seriously about law is during your college years. On most college campuses, you will find prelaw counselors who can advise you what courses to take before going to law school and tell you something about different law schools. As to college courses, your best procedure is to take as many so-called liberal arts courses as possible: courses in English, literature, history, philosophy, government, politics and economics. But, in general, remember that a broad range of knowledge should be your stock in trade: as a lawyer you never know what sort of problem in what sort of field you will encounter through your clients.
Toward the end of your college career, you should file applications for admission to several law schools. The reason more than one application is necessary is that the competition for admission is already severe, and it is growing. There are some 150 accredited law schools in the United States. The great majority of them require you to obtain a college degree before entering law school, although some permit you to combine your last year of college with your first year of law school.
Two categories of schools exist side by side: law schools attached to state universities and schools that are part of private universities. Two distinguishing characteristics – but not the only ones – are the size of the student body and the faculty-student ratio. In general, the state schools are the larger ones. The larger law schools will have several hundred students in each year's class; smaller schools range in size from l25 to 175 per class.
State university law schools tend to concentrate on the traditional law courses: contracts, torts, constitutional law, procedure, property, wills, trusts and estates, corporation, partnerships, agency, international law, maritime law, labor law, administrative law. Private law schools, since they are somewhat smaller and generally enjoy a higher proportion of faculty to students, can afford to offer a wider variety of courses, particularly in new, developing fields. The catalogs of these schools list courses or seminars in such areas as psychiatry and law, law and sociology, urban law, poverty law, environmental law, urban finance, land planning, and so on. The titles of the courses are often misleading, because much of the material covered in them was previously covered in other courses with less glamorous titles.
Most of the law schools do not try to teach you the law of one state or another; they concentrate on teaching you legal principles, legal reasoning and something of the philosophy of law. When you graduate and before you can start practicing law, you must take a bar examination given by public authorities in the state you expect to live in and where you intend to practice the law you have learned. If you pass it (about 50 percent succeed on the first try), you must appear before a committee that examines your character and fitness to become a member of the bar. However, your admission to the bar – your license to practice – in one state, does not entitle you to practice in another state.
