Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Want To Go to Law School Because You're Interested in Law and the Internet?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_10_19-2008_10_25.shtml#1224886479
Would-be law students occasionally ask me what's the best way of
getting into Internet law. What school should they go to? How should
they prepare? I'm not sure what the right answer is, but I thought I'd
pass along some tentative thoughts:
1. Be skeptical about your initial interest. If you're excited about
Internet law, that's great. But keep in mind that you probably know
very little about what Internet law practice is actually like, and
that Internet law practice (even if you can get into it) tends to be
very little about the Internet as such.
My sense, for instance, is that most cases involving "Internet law"
actually involve the application of familiar cross-medium legal
principles -- contract law, copyright law, contract law, trademark
law, libel law, insurance law, did I mention contract law?, free
speech law, jurisdiction law, and the like -- to Internet transactions
and businesses. Occasionally, you do have cases that turn on
Internet-specific rules, or rules that end up operating differently on
the Internet. But those cases are rare, and even those cases will
mostly be about general legal principles and only partly about
"Internet law" as such.
Perhaps you'll still be excited about them because they involve the
Internet, just as many entertainment lawyers or sports lawyers get and
stay excited about their fields even though the legal rules may be
largely the same as for other business transactions. But you might
well conclude that you'd gladly do copyright law generally, whether
tied to the Internet or not, or that you don't much care for
litigation generally, whether tied to the Internet or not.
2. Be open to other interests. Recall also that you probably don't
know how much you might be interested in other legal subjects and
other practice areas, which you just haven't studied. What if you find
criminal law -- or even tax law, bankruptcy law, or securities law --
especially fascinating? (Though tax law doesn't sound sexy, many
people come to like it a great deal, and see it as an unusually
intellectually stimulating field.)
It may well be that several years from now, when you've seen more of
the law, you'll find some other area to be more interesting than the
one that fascinates you now. So stay open to the possibility, and
don't focus too much on your current interests in choosing a law
school, or preparing for law school.
3. Choose law school based on its overall quality, not its
specialization. Law school really is primarily about teaching you how
to think like a lawyer, and teaching you the skills and concepts that
lawyers regularly use. It will also teach you specific legal rules,
but most of the important ones -- even for people who want to
specialize in, say, Internet law -- are rules that you'll learn at any
good law school in generalist classes such as copyright law, trademark
law, free speech law, and the like. And the other things you need to
know you'll be able to pick up yourself, either in practice on in
doing independent research projects during law school.
Relatedly, the credential value of a law school education will mostly
turn (or so I've seen) on the reputation of the law school, coupled
with your performance in law school, not on the reputation of a
particular program within the law school. There might be exceptions,
but I think this is the general rule.
So you might want to choose a top-tier law school, if you can get into
it, because it has such a good reputation. Or you might want to choose
a mid-tier law school in which your predictors (LSAT score and
undergraduate GPA) are near the top or the high middle, rather than
the one top-tier law school that let you in even though your
predictors would place you at the bottom of the class. (There's
something to be said for either approach.) Or you might want to choose
a law school that's in a city where you'll be close to family. But I
wouldn't much focus on the law school's specialty offerings, even if I
knew that I wanted to practice, say, cyberspace law. And I certainly
wouldn't much focus on the specialty offerings if I concluded that I
couldn't reliably predict what I'd eventually want to practice (for
the reasons given in points 1 and 2).
4. Choose pre-law classes that will improve your writing skills.
(Almost) no matter what kind of law you'll want to practice, writing
will be one of the most important skills you can have. And while good
legal writing follows somewhat different conventions from good writing
generally, the two have a lot in come. Moreover, while law school will
teach you a lot about some lawyerly skills -- reading cases, reading
statutes, constructing arguments, and "thinking like a lawyer" -- and
while law school will try to teach you something about legal writing,
you probably won't learn anywhere near enough about writing in law
school alone. So the more you can improve your writing before law
school, the better.
5. Should you choose other pre-law classes that fit your current
expectations about your future career? All this having been said,
should you still try to prepare for an Internet law career by studying
more about Internet architecture, or computer programming, or what
have you? After all, if you're thinking this hard about going to law
school, you're probably the preparing type -- shouldn't you do
something special to prepare?
I'm not sure, because if you're already so interested in Internet law,
you probably know a decent amount about the underlying technology and
the underlying business structures. And it's not like you really have
to know a vast amount of technology to do a good job as an Internet
lawyer. (You might need to know a lot of biology to be a biotech
patent lawyer, though I've heard some patent lawyers express doubt
even about that. But my experience has been that most Internet law
issues can be understood with a decent but not vast amount of
understanding of Internet technology.)
But, hey, if you really want to take those classes, go ahead. At least
you'll be interested in them, you'll get good grades, and you might
have a better GPA when you apply to law school.
* * *
In any case, that's my tentative thinking about the subject; I'd love
to hear what others have to say.
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