Pre-Law Preparation
Admission requirements at law schools normally include the completion of a baccalaureate degree program at an accredited institution, a distinguished overall average, and a competitive score on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Standards concerning grade averages and LSAT scores vary from school to school. Law schools do not specify a particular undergraduate curriculum or major as preparation for a legal education. Legal study draws on many fields of knowledge in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Potential law students should elect courses sufficiently diverse to acquire the basic ideas and methodologies of a number of disciplines, and to develop their skills of critical analytical thinking and effective written and oral expression. The pre-law advisors—John B. Taylor, Professor of Political Science, and Michael P. Harvey, Associate Professor of Business Management, are available to help in this process. They counsel individual students with respect to course selection and the law school application process and provide periodic programs and workshops of interest to pre-law students.
The regular course distribution requirements at Washington College, which provide the student with a broad foundation in the liberal arts and sciences, are part of the general preparation for law school. The pre-law student is urged to consider taking some of the following courses, either as part of the distribution requirement or as electives. The pre-law advisors particularly recommend those courses marked with an asterisk: Logic because it is helpful in preparing for the LSAT, the three political science courses because they prepare students for the study of cases in law school, business law because it introduces topics like contracts and torts, and ethics because it raises issues central to the profession.
Recommended Courses
- BUS 213. Financial Accounting
- BUS 314. Managerial Accounting
- *BUS 321. The Legal Environment of Business
- DRA 105. Principles of Effective Speaking
- ECN 111, 112. Introduction to Macroeconomics and Microeconomics
- ECN 416. Law and Economics
- ENG 101, 102. Forms of Literature and Composition
- HIS 201, 202. History of the US
- MAT 100. Basics of Computing
- MAT 109. Statistics
- PHL 100. Introduction to Philosophy
- *PHL 108. Logic
- *PHL 225. Ethics
- PHL 300. Business Ethics
- PHL 335. Philosophy of Law
- POL 102. American Government
- *POL 407. Law and Society
- *POL 420. Constitutional Powers and Judicial Process
- *POL 422. Civil Liberties
- SOC 240. Criminology
* particularly recommended for pre-law students