General Advice on Course Selection
Prof. Fajer's personal recommendations; not officially approved by faculty.
You will find it helpful also to get advice from other faculty members and lawyers.
Overview. This section summarizes advice I regularly provide about course selection. For me, the key thing to remember is that course selection is important, but not always in the ways that most of you imagine at this stage of your careers. The courses you choose will certainly affect how enjoyable, challenging and engaging your time here will be. However, as long as your transcript doesn't look too unusual overall, most employers at the interview stage are not especially concerned with the particular courses you have taken. Moreover, your training here generally will allow you to learn what you need about a particular field if you haven't already taken a course in it. I spent most of my time in practice litigating cases involving Securities Regulation and Insurance, neither of which I had taken in Law School. Sometimes a particular class discussion or exercise or bit of advice from a faculty member can greatly affect the way you think about being a lawyer and even help you make significant career decisions. However, these helpful moments may come in any class, regardless of whether it appears to directly relate to the areas in which you eventually practice. The bottom line is that failure to get into a particular class or to have a particular professor will not make the difference between success and failure as a lawyer. Sometimes the classes you end up taking because there's not much else left or because the time seems convenient prove to be the most memorable.
So how should you choose? I suggest focusing on the three ideas laid out in detail below: (A) becoming a well-rounded lawyer; (B) resume management; and (C) taking care of yourself.
A. Becoming a Well-Rounded Lawyer (and a little bit about the Bar Exam):
1. Basics for Everyone: One significant goal of law school is to familiarize you with some basic concepts that will be useful in most types of practice. The first year curriculum takes care of a lot of this concern and studying for the bar takes care of much of the rest. From the upper level curriculum, almost all lawyers or faculty members you ask will have a list of 8-12 courses they believe all law students should take. These lists vary a bit, but generally overlap a great deal. My version of the list follows. You don't need to take all of these, but if you take most of them, you adequately will take care of reasonable expectations about your general legal knowledge.
Administrative Law: Almost all forms of practice today require you to work with agencies and their regulations.
Business Associations: All forms of practice are likely to involve corporations and a basic understanding of how they work is very helpful
Evidence: Even if you are not litigating, understanding what evidence can and can't be used is useful in advising clients.
Federal Income Tax I: Tax issues can show up in surprising places; the basic course will help you to at least recognize when you need to consult an expert.
Substantive Criminal Law: Criminal issues arise in all forms of practice; a basic understanding is very helpful. Also, this is one of the areas where friends and family will expect you to have expertise.
Trusts & Estates: This is another area where friends and family expect you to have expertise. You will find it useful to know enough to be able to tell them when they have a complex problem that requires an expert. You also generally will find it useful to know how trusts and the probate system operate.
U.S. Constitutional Law II: Speech and Equal Protection issues arise in all areas of practice. Taking ConLaw II early will also make a number of more advanced courses easier (e.g. Family Law, Communications Law, Employment or Housing Discrimination)
At Least One Comparative/International Course : International issues arise today in a surprising range of practice areas; you will probably want some familiarity with how international or transnational legal issues are resolved. We have a broad array of international and comparative offerings to choose from. More basic courses useful for non-specialists include International Law, Comparative Law and International Business Transactions.
At Least One Course Addressing a Complex Statute: The first-year curriculum generally includes only limited exposure to long modern statutes. You should take at least one course where you have to do extensive work with one or more complex statutes. Examples include Commercial Law, Bankruptcy and Environmental Law.
2. Preparing for the Bar Exam: Obviously an important part of becoming a well-rounded lawyer is becoming a lawyer in the first place: you will need to pass a bar exam to practice. Although the bar is a crucial hurdle, most of you will practice law for thirty or forty years; preparing for your career should be your primary focus. Bar review courses do a good job of conveying the information you need for the exam and readying you for its format. Moreover, our own studies of our grads found no evidence that taking particular courses increases the chance of passing. That said, most people find it helpful in the bar review process (at least in terms of minimizing stress) if they are not encountering vast amounts of material for the first time. You've already covered a lot of what's tested on the bar in your first year courses. Much of the rest falls in courses most of you probably will take anyway (e.g., Business Associations, Evidence, Substantive Criminal Law, US Con Law II). It is worthwhile to check the other subjects covered in states in which you might take the exam and to consider taking at least some of the relevant courses.
B. Resume Management: One consideration in choosing courses is creating a record that will help you get the entry-level jobs you want. This certainly should not be your only concern; as I noted above, most employers care about your grades and about the skills you have acquired much more than they care about your course selection. However, you should give some thought to how your record will look to a potential employer, both in terms of demonstrating interest in a speciality (if you have chosen one) and of making you look good generally. If you address these concerns thoughtfully, making yourself look like a more desirable employee will also help make you a better lawyer.
1. Preparing for a Specialty Area: There is no absolute need to choose a specialty or particular focus while in law school (I certainly didn't). Even if you do choose a specialty, it is not like a college major; courses in that area shouldn't fill up your entire schedule. The faculty has developed lists of courses relevant to particular specialty areas you can use as guides that you can access through the Registrar's web page. In addition, if you are going to advertise yourself to employers as interested in a particular specialty area, you should have at least a couple of courses on your transcript that suggest that you haven't invented your specialty solely for the purposes of a job interview. Remember that courses whose subject matter is not within the specialty still can be useful both as training and as advertising if they incorporate skills that would be relevant to the practice area. For example, you might wish to take a Family Law class that included a significant negotiation exercise as training for any type of practice that involves a lot of negotiation.
2. Putting Yourself in the Best Light: Some of you have transcripts that reflect great success on law school exams; more of you have transcripts that are less helpful. If you are in the latter category, there are a number of ways that you can use the course selection process to improve your marketability.
First, there are numerous benefits to taking a course with a significant paper each semester. Even if your writing is quite good, it will improve with practice under good supervision. If you do a good job, you end up with well-edited writing samples and a useful letter of recommendation from your advisor. Most professors will let you do multiple rewrites, so you have much more control over your grade than you do with an exam. And employers will understand the argument that the work they will have you do is often more like your papers than like an issue-spotting exam where you have very little time to think through a problem.
Second, take some courses that evaluate you, wholly or in part, on skills other than exam-taking. In addition to the purely skills training classes, a number of "traditional" courses incorporate lawyering exercises or short papers and projects. You should welcome the opportunity to get training in significant legal skills. Moreover, as with research papers, strong performances these exercises and projects can give rise to writing samples and letters of recommendation that employers will take seriously.
Finally, when you are otherwise in doubt, don't choose a set of courses that will make it hard for you to do your best work. If you are not particularly good at law school exams generally, don't create a schedule where you have five or six grades resting entirely on exams. On the other hand, don't commit to writing four significant research papers in the same semester. If you have a lot of trouble with multiple choice exams, avoid courses that have them (unless you have other strong reasons to take the course). When the exam schedule comes out at the beginning of the semester, check it carefully. If you have four exams in six days, you might think about switching out of one of them that you don't otherwise feel strongly about.
Some students try to put themselves in the best light by choosing professors with reputations as easy graders. I'm not sure whether this strategy is effective in practice, but it has several important drawbacks. Most obviously, even people whose grades on average are a little bit higher are likely to reward poor or mediocre work with poor or mediocre grades. More importantly, as this page suggests, there are lots of important considerations in choosing classes. Should you really give up a course with important content, or experience with a useful legal skill, or an entertaining and challenging professor because of a guess that you might receive a slightly higher grade? It's your call, but keep in mind that small differences in your GPA (e.g., the difference between a B and a C+ in a three credit class) are unlikely to greatly affect your employment prospects.
C. Taking Care of Yourself: The most significant effect of your course selections is that they largely determine how much you'll enjoy your last four semesters of law school. Care choosing your schedule can make the difference between a semester that feels like endless drudgery and one in which you are intellectually engaged and (reasonably) happy to go to school each day. Help yourself get the most out of the experience. Some considerations:
1. Balance in Course Selection Each Semester: Many students' instinct is to treat the second year of law school like their sophomore year in college: take a bunch of basic required courses to "get them out of the way" and leave time for more interesting classes later. The most extreme versions of this approach have students taking four 4-credit courses in the fall of their second year, which usually is not a recipe for a happy semester. 4-credit classes tend to be large, work-intensive, and graded solely on the basis of a long final exam. Moreover, if you are in a course only because you think you have to take it, you are much less likely to enjoy it. Instead, I'd recommend spreading the basic courses out over the two years, first (where possible) doing the ones that are recommended prerequisites for other courses you want to take later. Each semester in addition to a couple of basic courses, I'd take at least one class whose subject matter really excites you, at least one class likely to have less than 50 people (if it's scheduled to meet in 108/109/110/209/309/352 it isn't), and at least one class that doesn't have the whole grade riding on the final exam. One seminar regarding an interesting topic can serve all three of these functions
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2. Comfortable Daily/Weekly Schedule: Where possible, give yourself a set of meeting times that will facilitate your own learning. The first year schedule is deliberately spread out across the week so that you have some time prior to almost every class to review the assigned reading and get focused. If you find this preparation time really helpful, try to leave yourself spaces between the classes. Some people like to cram all their classes into a couple of days, which is fine so long as you will not be completely burnt out when you are sitting in the last class or two. Some of you perform better at different times of day. For example, I have the least focus and energy mid-afternoon. All else being equal, avoid classes at your worst times. However, sometimes you need to bite the bullet and get up early or stay up late to take a course you really want or need. Many students prefer to have Fridays off, but that isn't always possible. There are a lot of upper level basic courses meeting on Friday mornings next year. This helps optimize the use of the large classrooms to help reduce waiting lists. Moreover, the ABA requires us to run upper level classes on Fridays and since they are visiting us next year, we need to be especially careful to meet this requirement.
3. Choose Professors Rather Than Course Titles: Take advantage of the quality and depth of our faculty. Your educational experience depends much more on the professor than on the course content. When in doubt, choose your courses to experience our strongest teachers and/or those professors with intellectual interests that match your own. Talk to professors and other students for recommendations of good teachers (keeping in mind that not everyone likes the same professors). Look at old course evaluations (on reserve at the circulation desk in the library). Look at the information on faculty interests and writings on the website. In the end, you are likely to learn the most from professors who keep your attention and keep you thinking.