How to Bridge the Gap Between College and Law School
As a pre-law advisor and political science professor at Touro College, I often speak with undergraduates who are planning to attend law school. Most know that their job prospects are linked to the quality of the law school they attend, so they set their sights high. They recognize that their LSAT score is the single biggest determinant of their law school choices, so they find out what local LSAT instructor has the best record of success. They know that at New York City law schools, for example, scholarship aid is negotiable, so they develop strategies for minimizing their tuition payment through multiple rounds of negotiation.
Unfortunately, the time horizon of my pre-law students seems to end on the day they decide which law school to attend. Many pre-law students seem to believe that law school provides an autonomous form of education that is entirely different from college, and, therefore, there is little to be gained from studying law before going to law school. I have spoken with several law school applicants who have never read a judicial opinion of any kind, let alone a Supreme Court decision. When I ask advisees if they worry about their lack of knowledge about law, a common response is, “I’ll learn what I need to know about law when I get to law school.”
I shared my advisees’ perspective when I was an undergraduate. After taking a pre-law course my sophomore year, I decided not to take any more pre-law courses since I thought I could learn about law in law school. However, when I began law school, I found it difficult to outperform classmates who had taken several pre-law classes or done legal work during or after college. Their more extensive preparation taught them many of the cases and concepts that I first encountered in law school and helped them excel in their first-year classes. Law review membership, teaching assistant positions, and paid summer jobs are often based on first-year grades, which means that law students don’t have the luxury of mastering the law over the three years of law school. If they want to maximize their future opportunities, they need to do well their first year—or be left behind.
Since law schools rely on colleges to prepare their students, one would think that there would be extensive dialogue between their faculties over how substantive law and legal skills are taught at the undergraduate level. Yet, such dialogue is surprisingly rare. Few law school professors interact with undergraduate professors who teach similar subjects, as I learned in teaching on both law school and college faculties. The absence of this dialogue is illustrated by the conference agendas of the American Association of Law Schools, directed only at law school education, and the American Political Science Association, which focuses only on political science education. There has been no organized conference that brings together professors from both law schools and colleges to talk about how law should be taught.
However, this year, that changed. The Northeast Association of Pre-law Advisors (NAPLA) established a pre-law pedagogy track that ran throughout its annual conference in Pittsburgh. Each of the five panels included a law school dean or professor in addition to undergraduate pre-law faculty. Presentations focused on effective ways of developing writing and oral advocacy skills that will make undergraduates better prepared for what they are asked to do as first-year law students. College faculty discussed writing assignments ranging from case briefs to judicial opinions to petitions for certiorari. They also discussed a variety of oral advocacy assignments and explored debate formats that would best develop students’ critical thinking skills. The law school participants added valuable commentary on the degree to which these exercises would be helpful in advancing the skills of future law students.
The pre-law pedagogy track was a success, and the foundations of a bridge have now been built. There is now a professional conference that will annually bring together educators from both colleges and law schools to talk about how substantive law and legal skills should be taught. Hopefully, this will encourage more interaction between those who teach legal subjects at the same university, albeit at different levels. There is much that educators on both levels can share about legal education, and hopefully, in the future, there will be much more that is shared.
Tom Rozinski, JD, MA, is Pre-law Advisor and Associate Professor of Political Science at Touro College in New York. He is a Vice President of the Northeast Association of Pre-law Advisors and conference chair of NAPLA’s 2018 conference in North Haven, Connecticut. He can be reached at thomas.rozinski@touro.edu.
