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In the United States, the institution where future lawyers obtain a legal degree is called a law school. Attendees are called law students. In most cases, law schools grant the degree Juris Doctor or J.D., though some schools still award the LL.B. degree which is still common in other common law jurisdictions, mostly commonwealth countries. A law school is usually an autonomous entity within a larger university and considered to be a graduate school program. In other jurisdictions these programs are more completely integrated into the other university faculties, such as in Canada where they are often called a faculty of law. Other degrees that are awarded included the Master of Laws degree (L.L.M.) and the Doctor of Laws degree (J.S.D.).
Admission to law school requires a bachelor's degree, a satisfactory undergraduate grade point average, and a satisfactory score on the Law School Admissions Test. The standard varies from school to school. Highly-regarded law schools, such as Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford, usually look for an LSAT score over 170 and a GPA above 3.7: most law schools will admit less-qualified applicants.
In recent years, most schools have moved away from a strict admissions policy based entirely on GPA and LSAT scores, and have begun admitting applicants from outside the traditional pool in order to boost campus diversity. Many law schools now factor in extracurricular activities, work experience, and unique courses of study in their evaluation of applicants. A growing number of law school applicants are individuals with several years of work experience: relatively fewer law students enter immediately after completing their undergraduate education.
Law students are referred to as '1L's, '2L's, and '3L's, based on their year of study. In the United States, the American Bar Association mandates a curriculum for 1L's that includes:
These basic courses are intended to provide an overview of the broad study of law. Not all ABA-approved law schools offer all of these courses in the 1L year; a significant number of schools make constitutional law and criminal law required upper-level courses.
The ABA also requires that all students at ABA-approved schools take a course in professional ethics for lawyers; this course is typically an upper-level course, most often taken in the 2L year.
After the first year, law students are generally free to pursue different fields of legal study, such as administrative law, corporate law, international law, admiralty law, intellectual property law, and tax law.
Many law students participate in internship programs during their course of study. Some become assistants ("clerks") for local, state, and federal judges: others work in law firms, corporations, or legal aid clinics. Most law schools also offer programs such as trial teams and moot courts, which allow students to practice arguing before "judges" and "juries" composed of professors and other law students.
Most law school education is based on standards developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard Law School during the mid-1800s. Professors generally lead in-class debates over the issues in selected court cases, compiled into "casebooks" for each course. Most law professors choose not to lecture extensively, and instead use the Socratic method to force students to teach each other based on their individual understanding of legal theory and the facts of the case at hand. Examinations usually entail interpreting the facts of a hypothetical case, determining how legal theories apply to the case, and then writing an essay. This process is intended to train students in the reasoning methods necessary to interpret theories, statutes, and precedents correctly, and argue their validity, both orally and in writing. In contrast, most civil law countries base their legal education on professorial lectures and oral examinations, which are more suited for the mastery of complicated civil codes.
This style of teaching is often discomforting to first-year law students who are more accustomed to taking notes from professors' lectures. Most casebooks do not clearly outline the law: instead, they force the student to interpret the cases and draw the basic legal concepts from the cases themselves. As a result, many publishers market law school outlines that concisely summarize the basic concepts of each area of law, and good outlines are highly sought after by many students, although some professors discourage their use.
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