What does law school involve?

Question

Recently I have been on a criminal jury. Seeing the court procedures and processes has got me wondering about lawyers. How long is law school? What does it entail? What's the BAR exam like? Is law school very rigid in its manners?

Answer 1

Law school is 3 years after your undergraduate degree (some schools offer part-time programs of 4 or 5 years). In law school you learn very little actual law that you will use when you become a lawyer. Rather, you learn how to find the laws you will need and how to interpret the laws once you find it. It is almost all academic, and you learn almost nothing about what you saw during your jury experience (i.e. how to try a case). That is learned in "the school of hard knocks" after you pass the bar.

The bar exam is a 2-3 day comprehensive test over everything you learned in law school plus what you learned in your "bar review" course that you will pay thousands of dollars for between graduation and the bar exam. Once you complete the exam, you then undergo a complete memory dump because you will never need 90% of the information you needed for the exam in your law practice.

Answer 2

Law school is 3 years (six semesters) full time, or 4 years part-time. It provides a thorough grounding (as a generalist) in all common areas of law -- civil and criminal procedure, tort law, contracts, remedies, evidence, legal ethics, and so on, plus electives.

Some schools are very rigid and traditional, some are more contemporary -- but almost all must meet ABA (American Bar Association) requirements for their diplomas to be sufficient to allow someone to sit for the bar.

The bar exam varies by state, but is generally 2~3 days. Think of doing a 3 day cumulative final of most of what you learned in college. That's the bar exam.