A number of factors should inform your curricular decisions, including: (1) preparing for the bar exam, (2) familiarizing yourself with the fundamentals of the substantive law in areas where you are likely to practice, (3) honing skills (writing, advocacy, negotiation, etc.) necessary to be an effective lawyer, and (4) satisfying your intellectual curiosity. There are no absolute rules for choosing courses. Nevertheless, you need to select a balance of offerings that expose you to a variety of subjects and skills and give you the versatility demanded of lawyers. Do not be tempted to choose courses on the basis of the average grade of the course or scheduling convenience. While it may not seem so now, your time in law school is precious; you may well miss out on opportunities to become a well-rounded lawyer by choosing courses on such bases.
The Bar Exam
Obviously, passing the bar exam is critically important, but do not let the bar exam dominate your curricular choices. Law school is not an extended bar review course. That said, we provide below some basic information on the subject areas covered by the bar exams most of you will take, New Jersey and New York, which have both adopted the Multi-state Bar Exam (MBE).
Multi-State Bar Exam
The Multi-state Bar Exam (MBE) is a six-hour, 200-question, multiple choice exam that comprises parts of the bar exams of all states except Louisiana and the District of Columbia. The MBE tests on seven major areas:
- Civil Procedure
- Constitutional Law
- Contracts
- Criminal Law and Procedure
- Evidence
- Real Property
- Torts
Each year, the MBE is administered by participating jurisdictions on the last Wednesday in February and the last Wednesday in July. Study aids can be found online at http://ncbex.org/study-aids/.
Anticipated Area of Practice
Choosing some of your classes with an eye toward gaining substantive knowledge related to your anticipated area of practice is sensible. However, legal careers often follow quite unanticipated paths. Often opportunities will arise that take one into new and very different areas of practice. Much more often than you might imagine, lawyers find themselves making careers in areas they did not contemplate in law school. Thus, you should be very cautious about focusing too narrowly on a particular subject area.
Intellectual Curiosity (Seminars)
We mentioned intellectual curiosity as a factor in course selection. Such curiosity may carry students in various directions. We want to note here our interesting selection of seminars. As many of you know from your undergraduate education, seminars are small classes that proceed by discussion rather than lecture and often require the student to develop a topic of interest into a project or paper. Seminars are also more likely to be quite focused on areas of the faculty member’s current research or practice interest, and thus involve areas in which the faculty member is giving concentrated thought. You might do well to consider taking at least one or two such offerings.
Miscellaneous Advice
Statute-Based Subjects. Students are often tempted to avoid statute-based courses, such as Federal Income Tax, Commercial Law, and Debtor-Creditor Law. Most practicing lawyers, however, will probably tell you that the great majority of legal work is done in areas governed by one or more comprehensive statutes. Accordingly, we firmly believe that law students do themselves a great disservice by avoiding “code-based” courses. Perhaps the tendency to shy away from such courses reflects a perception that those courses are particularly difficult. However, you will almost inevitably confront statute-based areas in your practice. Avoiding such courses will leave you unprepared for legal practice, putting you in the unfortunate situation of having to figure out such statutes on the fly without the support of an academic setting, and when a great deal may be at stake. More generally, avoiding such courses will likely leave you with a distorted perception of the importance of the courts, in particular, that law is almost exclusively developed by courts and rarely in any meaningful way by legislatures and administrative agencies.
Skills Courses. As a graduation requirement, students in the Class of 2016 were required to complete at least one skills course, such as Negotiations, Trial Presentation, or Appellate Advocacy, among others. Beginning with the Class of 2017, students are required to complete 6 credits of skills courses for graduation. Effective lawyering is measured not only by knowledge of substantive law, but by the skills and techniques necessary to put that knowledge to practical use. Of course, our clinics also teach skills in a practical setting, and up to two-thirds of our students take at least one clinical course at some time before graduation. However, you should not take so many skills courses that you do not have an opportunity to take an array of substantive classes, as we fear some students have done.
Global and Transnational Courses. Increasingly, law is becoming a global and transnational discipline. We, therefore, encourage you to take one or more courses that approach law from that perspective. Our faculty has expertise in a range of particular areas of international law, e.g., International Trade, International Law, International Criminal Law, International Taxation, and International Protection of Human Rights.