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Law School

A law school (also known as a school of law or college of law) is an institution specializing in legal education.

Post-graduate law degrees

Law schools in Canada and the United States typically require three years of study after completing an undergraduate degree. Programs which offer part-time study or joint-degree programs may last four or more years such as the joint BA/LL.B or BA/JD programs in Australia. Upon graduation from law school, students are awarded a professional degree, the Juris Doctor (J.D.) or Doctor of Law degree in the U.S. or the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.; or, from the University of Toronto and Queen's University, a J.D.) in Common law Canada and Bachelor of Civil Law (B.C.L) in Civil Law Canada (Quebec) and some schools in Louisiana. Some schools also offer a Master of Laws (LL.M.) program, offered as a way of specializing in a particular area of law. A further possible degree is the academic doctoral degree in law of Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) (in the U.S)., or the Doctorate of Laws (LL.D.) in Canada, or the Ph.D. in Law from European or Australasian universities.

In addition to attending law school, in most jurisdictions a graduate of a law school is required to pass the state or provincial bar examination in order to practice law. The Multistate Bar Examination is part of the bar examination in almost all United States jurisdictions; generally, the standardized, common law subject matter of the MBE is combined with state-specific essay questions to produce a comprehensive bar examination.

In the U.S., law school typically involves a full time course of study, though there are part-time programs available. In Canada, part-time study is very rare.

On July 3, 2007, the Korean National Assembly passed legislation introducing 'Law School', closely modeled on the American post-graduate system.

Controversies

Recently, in the United States, critics have emerged questioning the forthrightness of some law schools in providing prospective students with accurate facts regarding alumni job- placement and compensation rates, suggesting that certain law schools may be distorting their statistics in order to attract students to their institutions. In particular, many law school graduates--particularly at lower-ranked schools--suggest that their schools utilized correct, but misleading, statistics to attract students. An example of this would be citing the mean graduate salary, instead of the median; while the median salary of law grads in the U.S. is approximately $62,000, the mean could be inflated somewhat by a relatively small concentration of graduates earning starting salaries well above the median. For example, the starting salary at nearly all large law firms in several cities across the country in 2008 is $160,000 plus bonus. Also, it is very likely that even median salary statistics are incorrect, since students who are unemployed, working temporary jobs or have a low salary are less likely to submit a salary report to the school.

A common response to this criticism, however, is that it simply reflects the reality of competitiveness in legal education and in the legal market. With a limited number of top positions available, prospective law students should be circumspect about the employment opportunities that will await them after graduation—especially if they plan on attending a lower-ranked school. At the same time, however, students at prestigious, highly regarded institutions often have a variety of options available. This discrepancy can be seen as a simple function of supply and demand, with the number of newer (and thus lower-ranked) law schools proliferating in recent years. A similar difficulty may be encountered by graduate students in other fields, although the aforementioned lack of accurate information about post-graduate employment may exacerbate the problem for law students.

Even when students are able to find jobs at the top-paying law firms, some say that minority law school graduates have difficulty advancing their careers. The law student organization Building a Better Legal Profession generated controversy for showing the lack of female and minority partners in large private firms. In an October 2007 press conference reported in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the group released data publicizing the numbers of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans at America's top law firms. The group has sent the information to top law schools around the country, encouraging students to take this demographic data into account when choosing where to work after graduation. As more students choose where to work based on the firms' diversity rankings, firms face an increasing market pressure in order to attract top recruits.

As well, there has been some controversy regarding the stark increases in law school tuition in recent years, at a time when compensation packages in the legal services sector are growing much more slowly than the U.S. inflation rate.

Some attribute these issues to insufficient regulation of law schools by the American Bar Association. The total number of Juris Doctor degrees awarded has been on the rise in recent years, at least partially due to the accreditation of new schools by the ABA.