Originally posted by: Taughnter
Originally posted by: speedstream5621
I'm a junior in high school and ultimately want to be a lawyer. Constitutional and International Law are the two subject areas I am most interested in. As far as being an undergraduate goes, is it better to do Pre-Law or Political Science? Are you more likely to burn out doing Pre-Law? Does Political Science offer a more diverse background/education? I've noticed that Pre-Law is not offered at very many universities and am wondering if that is something I should keep on my radar screen.
Any lawyers around that would like to give some feedback about studying law in general?
I'm not a lawyer, but hopefully will be in shortly over a year. I'm about to start my third year of law school so hopefully I can give you some sound advice based on my own experiences.
First off, do whatever you think you will enjoy. Bottom line here is that you want to get the best possible grades and prepare yourself for the LSAT (not yet, but when the time comes). At my law school we have such diverse group I would say that there is no such thing as the "right" major. (Doctors, chemists, engineers, business majors, philosophy, psychology, even someone who played semi-pro sports in europe) If you really want to get a good background for law, poli sci is probably the way to go, but not every poli sci major does well in law school and plenty of the best law students come from entirely non-law backgrounds.
Second, I don't even know what "pre-law" is, I think its not something that most schools offer and its more of a status than a major.
I notice some people have suggested business or something else that will allow you a "fallback" career. I tend to agree with this line of thinking, as you may change your mind completely on whether you want to go to law school. I only decided on it during my junior year of college when I realized how little I wanted to study business/accounting.
I'm not trying to write a novel, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I have some more to say here. I majored in philosophy and psychology (yes, both) in undergrad, and I would like to point out that BOTH of these fields can be good for studying law. First of all, people nowadays often associate philosophy with stoners, and its really a pity because if you have a good philosophy background you will be much better at logic and forming arguments (two very important things for law school). Psychology is also useful, but more in the sense of knowing background info (and mainly in a criminal law context).
As I said earlier, do whatever you enjoy and think you will do best in. No matter what you end up doing, take some poli sci courses, take some criminal justice (taking criminal procedure in college was incredibly helpful for me), and DEFINETELY take a course in logic. (If your school offers a course in symbolic logic, that would be good.) The logic course would be the absolute best thing you can do to prepare for the LSAT. Over 50% of the test is based on logical analysis and having a background in it will give you such an edge over people who haven't taken such a course. Aside from taking an intro to logic course the only other prep I had for the LSAT was a 20 dollar Princeton Review book that I worked on for 2-4 weeks prior to the exam and I was able to score in the top 94th percentile (this is good enough to go to most tier 2 schools).
I'm going to stop myself from writing anymore, but if you have anymore questions about what I posted feel free to PM or reply here and I'll check back. Hopefully this helps you out.
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