Academics
According to the American Bar Association, “The ABA does not recommend any undergraduate majors or group of courses to prepare for a legal education.” Therefore, you should devote your time as an undergraduate to develop a broad base of knowledge and major in something that you will truly enjoy studying.
Nevertheless, even in the absence of a recommended or required Pre-Law major, students are strongly encouraged to pursue courses that will help them develop some core skills and competencies upon which their law school education will build:
Analogical Reasoning
In addition to a training in legal doctrine, law school is a training in legal reasoning. Legal professionals must learn to apply extant law to novel cases and this requires a skill students can begin to develop in college: reasoning by way of analogy.
On the one hand, legal education challenges students to read and synthesize large amounts of material. However, it also demands that students be able to read “closely,” attending to the ways that a text (whether a contract or a novel) constructs meaning.
Close Reading
Clarity of Expression
As professionals who provide lay persons with access to the Law, lawyers must convey complex technical concepts to courts, colleagues, and clients with simplicity, clarity, and force. Therefore, cultivating a clarity of expression in written and oral communication (along with good listening skills) is a key area of competency to target during your undergraduate education.
Legal education and the practice of law are distinctly challenging endeavors. They require the cultivation of a character well fitted to this work. Therefore, students should take time not only to develop the foregoing skills, but also to reflect on the values and guiding principles that have sparked their interest in law and will one day inform their legal practice.
Professional Identity
A variety of courses can foster growth in each of these areas. Courses in philosophy can engage students in inquiries that habituate them in careful reasoning and the interrogation of values. Courses in english and history can teach students skills for close reading. Courses in communication are a boon to a student’s clarity of expression. However, all of the above competencies can be developed in a wide array of classes that go beyond these “traditional” pre-Law majors.
As students are selecting courses, they are encouraged to consult this list of courses as a starting point. However, they should avail themselves of the wide array of opportunities that Wake Forest’s rigorous curriculum makes available to them.