[3]: 390 In England in 1292, when Edward I first requested that lawyers be trained, law students merely sat in the courts and observed.
[4]: 431 By the 17th century, the Inns obtained a status as a kind of university akin to Oxford and Cambridge, though very specialized in purpose.
[4]: 435 Professional training in England was unlike that of continental Europe, where the law was viewed as an academic discipline.
The university did not establish the program for the purpose of professional study, and the lectures were very philosophical and theoretical in nature.
[4]: 436 Initially there was much resistance to lawyers in colonial North America because of the role they played in hierarchical England.
Slowly the colonial governments started using the services of professionals trained in the Inns of Court, and by the end of the Revolution there was a functional bar in each state.
[5]: 781 The student was supposed to compile his notes of his reading of the law into a "commonplace book", which he would endeavor to memorize.
[5]: 782-783 One famous attorney in the United States, William Livingston, stated in 1745 in a New York newspaper that the clerkship program was severely flawed, and that most mentors "have no manner of concern for their clerk's future welfare… [T]is a monstrous absurdity to suppose, that the law is to be learnt by a perpetual copying of precedents.
[6] : 13 The apprenticeship programs often employed the trainee with menial tasks, and while they were well trained in the day-to-day operations of a law office, they were generally unprepared practitioners or legal reasoners.
programs in the early 1900s at Stanford University and Yale continued to include "cultural study," which consisted of courses in languages, mathematics and economics.
[7]: 19 In the 1850s there were many proprietary schools which originated from a practitioner taking on multiple apprentices and establishing a school and which provided a practical legal education, as opposed to the one offered in the universities which offered an education in the theory, history and philosophy of law.
[6]: 15 In part to compete with the small professional law schools, there began a great change in U.S. university legal education.
[5]: 798 U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story started the spirit of change in legal education at Harvard when, as a lecturer there in the early 19th century, he advocated a more "scientific study" of the law.
[6]: 19 Whereas in the 18th and 19th century, few U.S. lawyers trained in an apprenticeship "achieved a level of competence necessary to adequately serve their clients," today as a result of the development of the U.S. legal education system, "law graduates perceive themselves to be prepared upon graduation" for the practice of law.
(or other appropriate credential), must fulfill additional, state-specific requirements in order to gain admission to the bar in the United States.
The American Bar Association issued a Council Statement that the JD is equivalent to the PhD for educational employment purposes.
Depending upon their state, attorneys must also satisfy Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit requirements.
In larger cities, such as New York or Chicago, summer associates at large firms can make as much as $3,000 per week.
[15] Competition to receive a summer offer from a firm is intense, and credentials (a student's GPA and class rank, law review or moot court membership, publications, etc.)
First, during the early fall of their 2L (second year), students at each law school first submit their resumes to a central paper file or online database (such as CRIS or LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell[16]), from which interviewers selected candidates they wish to interview, based almost entirely on their 1L GPA and class rank.
After the callback, a selected candidate will receive a phone call (usually within 48 hours) informing them that they have been extended an offer.
A number of factors and statistics are compiled to produce these rankings each year, including academic reputation, the quality of the faculty (usually measured by the quality of its publications), the quality of the student body (usually measured by average Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, score and undergraduate grade point average), the number of volumes in the library, the earnings potential of graduates, bar passage rates, and job placement rates.
The T14 is composed of the schools listed above and also Berkeley (Boalt Hall), Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Michigan, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
These include: On the basis of these credentials, as well as favorable faculty recommendations and other connections, some students become law clerks with judges after graduation, signing on for one or two-year clerkships.
Almost without exception, these clerks are graduates of elite law schools (with Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago being the most highly represented schools) who have already clerked for at least one year with highly selective federal circuit court judges (such as Judges Merrick Garland, Alex Kozinski, Harvie Wilkinson, David Tatel, Richard Posner).
The vast majority of Supreme Court clerks either become academics at elite law schools, enter private practice as appellate attorneys, or take highly selective government positions.
Externship programs allow students to receive academic credit for unpaid work with a judge, government agency, or community legal services office.
Washington and Lee University School of Law has completely re-vamped its curriculum to require students to take practicum courses, externships, and clinics in the final year of law school to provide experience in preparation for practice.
Large scale representative studies find that the overwhelming majority of lawyers are satisfied with their careers and their decisions to attend law school.
See, for example, "Money and Ethics: The Young Lawyer's Conundrum", by Patrick J. Schiltz, January 2000 Washington State Bar News