Choosing your classes
What to think about planning your remaining two years
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If you’re a 1L, you’re probably soon to register for your Fall classes. This is how I’ve thought about what classes to take for 2L and 3L years.
(If you’re a 2L or 3L, don’t go– I’d love you to drop any tips you might have in the comments!)
I think of three main purposes for my law school education:
Priming
Career-making
Bar-preparing
If one class spans two or three of these, then it’s a shoo-in.
Primers are classes foundational to the practice of law. It’s content that might be tough to pick up on the job without any context. It’s subject matter you want to have dedicated “educational” time to get up to speed on. It’s stuff for which you want to have received a comprehensive curriculum. These are classes like Evidence and Criminal Procedure.
I ask myself: what areas of law can I walk into knowing nothing, and what areas of law would it help to have some baseline understanding of the paradigms? Generally, I find that niche, substantive law courses like Digital IP or Bankruptcy aren’t priming courses– but reasonable minds may differ (and I’m eager to know if any of my readers disagree).
Career-making classes are meant to prepare you for your post-graduate goals. They can be intended to give you baseline knowledge in more niche areas. For instance, because I was choosing between housing, employment or immigration law, I took classes in all these areas. I definitely could have learned the subject matter from my Employment Law class on the job, meaning it wasn’t a great priming class, but taking the class allowed me to get a sense of what kind of work I could be doing if I were to work in employment law, so it was useful from a career perspective.
I took Immigration Law class for career purposes too. It was a bit more like a primer in that it introduced me to important paradigms of immigration law like admissibility, deportation, and noncitizens’ rights under the Constitution– paradigms that I feel many immigration lawyers actually lack understanding of. Meanwhile, I also worked in my Farmworker Legal Assistance clinic serving real clients. Even more than my Immigration Law doctrinal, the clinic exposed me to the nature of the work I’d be doing as an immigration lawyer.
Finally, bar classes are just that: classes that prepare you for the bar. These were at the bottom of my priorities, since everyone re-learns material for the bar anyway. So I took a bar class this Spring of 2L, called Business Organizations, when I had my baby and wouldn’t be devoting full attention to it. You can Google what classes are considered bar classes– I find the information across the web to be relatively consistent.