This is the second article in our six-part law school guide (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). See also our general policy graduate school advice and policy master’s guide.

Summary

• Law school can provide students with several key benefits, including (1) knowledge about details of the US legal system helpful for various law- and policy-related careers, (2) developing important professionals skills and aptitudes, (3) building your network, (4) career exploration, and (5) gaining credentials.
• Law school is a necessary step to working as a lawyer, which includes some roles that are underexplored, such as becoming a litigator (a lawyer who works on cases that go to court) focused topics like biosecurity, or designing contracts and governance structures in high-stakes settings.
• Law school is not a good fit for everyone; for example, it is probably not the right choice for people who (1) don’t have a clear picture of how a law degree would help them have the positive impact they hope to have in the world, (2) already have a strong personal fit for a role working on a pressing problem, (3) have significant personal commitments that would make spending 50+ hours per week on schoolwork infeasible, (4) or for whom prolonged periods of stress or frequent discouraging feedback are especially costly.
• If you do decide to go to law school, it is valuable to go in with a clear plan about how you will use your legal education in policy or elsewhere. Plan to take advantage of opportunities to develop concrete skills, connect with relevant networks, and identify opportunities to achieve positive impact that others with different training and backgrounds might have missed.

Law school benefits

Structural knowledge about how law and public policy work

One of the fundamental things taught in law school is the process of answering a legal question: the components of an answer, where to find them, and how to piece them together to understand what is certain and what is ambiguous.

Legal training also gives people a sense of obstacles that are likely to arise when implementing or enforcing a policy. (For example, when might a court get in the way? When might the policy not be interpreted as you expect? When might it fall outside the authority of the entity enacting the policy?)

Domain-specific knowledge about particular areas of law

Law school courses also provide instruction in the content of law in several foundational areas. For example, the standard first-year curriculum¹ at most law schools equips students well to answer questions like:

1. What are the default rules used to decide who owns a piece of property?
   • Application: What rules would courts use to resolve conflicts about who owns content generated by AI models or whose content has been used to train AI models?
2. Under what circumstances will a court require a person to pay compensation to someone who was injured as a result of their conduct?
   • Application: When would a court require the operator of a lab that experienced a leak of a harmful pathogen to compensate people harmed as a result of the leak?
3. Under the US Constitution, what kinds of laws does only Congress have the power to enact, and what kinds of laws can also be enacted by states?
   • Application: What kinds of new requirements for bioengineering labs or AI models can be enacted at the state level, without requiring an act of Congress?

In second- and third-year courses, students can build relevant knowledge about a wider variety of topics, including specific subject-matter areas (e.g. intellectual property law, labor law, national security law, export control law).

As with the first-year curriculum, knowledge about these topics could have direct applications to important social issues, helping graduates make a positive difference through legal or policy action. For example:

1. A course in corporate law can help equip students to answer questions like, “How can members of the public affect corporate behavior?”
2. A course in administrative law can help equip students to answer questions like, “What is the extent of a federal agency’s power to regulate in a new area? When might a court step in to stop an agency action?”

It is possible to learn enough about the relevant law to perform research on these topics without attending law school. But law school can help a person become a much more effective legal researcher. Law school courses teach students how to identify the necessary and sufficient components of an answer to a legal question, how to read legal materials, and where to look to find the most relevant authorities. Also, giving professional legal advice to others about the answers to legal questions generally requires completing law school and becoming a member of the bar in the jurisdiction where you work.

Developing skills and aptitudes

Law school can help students build relevant professional skills and aptitudes that will help them in their future career, such as:

1. Analytical reasoning: Law school provides students with extensive practice in applying rules to facts, understanding how and why small changes to facts or rules lead to different outcomes, and identifying strengths and weaknesses of logical arguments. This practice may help students reason through other kinds of abstract problems.
2. Issue spotting: One of the core skills taught and tested in law school is quickly identifying and analyzing potential issues or points of failure (e.g. unlawful conduct) in a complicated fact pattern. This skill may help students identify potential mistakes or prioritize areas for follow-up questions in other contexts.
3. Distillation: Through assigned reading, law students gain significant experience reading long, complicated texts (especially judicial opinions) to extract the most important details. This practice may help students become more efficient in digesting large volumes of information.
4. Pragmatic, instrumental thinking: Many law school classes emphasize practical reasoning about how to achieve outcomes under certain sets of facts, constraints, and rules, in contrast to some kinds of undergraduate classes that emphasize more discursive, philosophical, or abstract thinking. This kind of thinking may be helpful to students who take roles that require a high level of practical sense about how to get things done.
5. Written communication: Many (though not all) law students complete significant writing assignments as part of classes or co-curricular activities, in contexts that prize clarity and brevity that is often lacking (or even disincentivized) in undergraduate writing instruction. This practice may help students learn to write more effectively, especially for audiences that expect the kind of organization and formal style of writing taught in most law schools.
6. Oral communication: In class, law students must often answer “cold calls” by providing impromptu oral responses to difficult questions in front of an audience of peers. There are also opportunities to opt-in to more extensive oral communication practice in courses like trial advocacy and activities like moot court. This practice may help students develop skill and confidence in explaining ideas in high-pressure situations.

Networks

Over the course of three years studying together and living in close proximity, most law students develop a strong professional network with many of their peers. Some students also form close relationships with professors, especially by working with them as research assistants. Many people also form connections with practicing lawyers and other experienced graduates of their law school through alumni networks.

Networking opportunities often continue well after graduation from law school. Lawyers have many opportunities to meet other people, especially other lawyers, including co-workers, co-counsel, opposing counsel, and judges hearing a client’s case. Networks within relatively small legal practice areas (for example, export control law) can be especially tight.

Law school can also provide access to people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. In some cases, a law school affiliation may make some people in high-leverage positions more likely to respond to thoughtful outreach.

The connections formed in law school and in legal practice can be valuable throughout a graduate’s career. Networks can help graduates learn about and secure future job opportunities and stay in touch with other law school graduates ending up in positions of significant social influence.

Career exploration

For many students, law school provides a unique opportunity to quickly access many different work environments, test your fit, network with potential employers, and work on interesting projects or with certain actors (e.g. the US Department of Justice) that would otherwise be very difficult to access.

Credentials

A law degree, especially from a top school, is a widely recognized credential that (in addition to being necessary to working as a lawyer) contributes to your professional development for paths in government and policy, even independent of the knowledge, skills, and networks that graduates obtain on their way to the degree.

These benefits can take many forms:

• Some roles are only available to people with law degrees (e.g. litigator, attorney-advisor, general counsel).
• Some highly competitive roles preferentially hire people with law degrees, even if they do not explicitly require a JD
• In some roles, people with law degrees may be taken more seriously by their colleagues or counterparts.
• People with law degrees may be more likely to be promoted later in their careers to influential positions.

But for many roles, there may be other ways of obtaining relevant, transferable credentials that are less expensive than law school in both time and money, including taking on a meaningful role working directly on important social problems. The credential value of a law degree also varies between different professional contexts: its value is lower, for example, in entrepreneurial circles than it is in government.

Other factors that might make law school a more attractive option

• You already have a strong interest in careers where a JD is necessary, such as becoming a litigator, or would provide a distinct advantage, such as working on regulatory policy in government.
• You already have academic credentials that make you a good candidate for admission to a competitive law school, such as a high undergraduate GPA and/or an especially high score on the LSAT or GRE. (See admissions “predictor” calculators here and here).
• You have access to significant financial resources, such as family support or scholarship funds, that you can use to pay law school tuition. (But note that, especially with support from LRAP, having these resources is not at all necessary to attending law school.)
• You are very strong in verbal reasoning and writing, so your best career opportunities are very likely to make active use of those skills rather than quantitative reasoning or other strengths.
• You know you do not want to further pursue your current career path or are not on any career path. Law school can serve as a career “reset” in that professional accomplishments prior to law school, unless truly exceptional or highly specialized, do not have a strong effect on what quality or types of legal jobs you can be considered for. Prior resume gaps or experiences you would prefer not to highlight will carry less weight after you graduate law school, and no one is expected to have any prior acquaintance with legal work or subject matter when they start law school.
• You would prefer to shift focus away from your undergraduate degree on your CV, either because your grades weren’t as strong as you would have liked or because you attended a college whose networks or employment outcomes aren’t as strong as those of a law school you could attend.

Why not go to law school?

There are some factors that might make law school a less attractive option, such as: 

1. Better alternatives: For many people, there are alternatives to law school that can provide many of the same benefits at a lower cost. For example, if you want to work in government, the costs and benefits of completing a policy master’s program may compare favorably to getting a JD. One reason against law school is if you don’t currently have a clear plan for what you would like to do after law school and why that option is valuable compared to your alternatives without a law degree.
2. Financial costs: Law school can be extraordinarily expensive, with many top law schools charging nearly $70,000 per year in tuition. The need to make payments on large student loans may push some law students toward high-paying roles in corporate law instead of more public interest-oriented roles in policy.
3. Time cost: Law school typically involves three years of (more than) full-time work. As such, a law degree is less attractive if you have significant personal commitments, such as family obligations, that make spending 50+ hours per week on schoolwork unusually costly.
4. Physical and mental health costs: Law school can harm people’s physical and mental health. It is relatively common to experience severe burnout at some point during or after spending three years in such a high-stakes, competitive environment. By one person’s estimate, perhaps 20% of students have a physical or mental health crisis during their 1L year. Be careful choosing law school if you find prolonged periods of stress, such as a multi-week exam period, or negative feedback, such as a disappointing response from a professor to an answer to a cold-call question you gave in front of several dozen classmates, to be especially discouraging.
5. Value of a law degree: If you already have established credentials, the additional value of a law degree would be less useful for roles outside the legal field.
6. Bad incentives: Law school may push some students toward decisions that they would not, prior to law school, have considered optimal. Law students are often surrounded by peers who are optimizing for landing jobs practicing corporate law at large firms, instead of pursuing public interest roles in policy. Being surrounded by peer groups with such different goals may challenge students to sustain their motivation to pursue a less-trodden path, such as working on emerging technology policy in DC.²

Advice if you lean toward pursuing law school

Choosing law school to avoid making career decisions is a common mistake

Many people enter law school in part to avoid making decisions about what to aim for in their careers. This is understandable: making these decisions is genuinely difficult and in most cases involves grappling with massive uncertainty about personal fit and the potential impact of different paths. But law school is a costly choice that will not, on its own, provide a satisfying resolution to most people’s uncertainty about where to begin their careers. On the contrary, some people find law school pushes them toward career decisions they would not have considered optimal when they first applied.

Instead, it is helpful to approach the choice to attend law school as an important career decision in itself—not to mention perhaps the largest single financial investment you will ever make. Your experience in law school, like your experience in a first full-time, permanent job, will shape the rest of your career. Considering the choice in those terms might help you decide how law school compares to your other options.

Most people shouldn’t leave promising work for law school without a clear plan

Other people leave a job they enjoy and find valuable to enter law school, perhaps because they believe it is important to have the credential value of a graduate degree. While this move can make sense, make sure you understand how law school will help you achieve your long-term goals before making the leap.

If you think your current work is promising and a good fit, before leaving for law school, make sure you have a clear plan for how law school will help you pursue even better opportunities in the future. Talking with more senior people in the field where you hope to work long-term can be a good way of checking how valuable a law degree is likely to be.

Entering law school with a theory of change in mind can help

There are many different ways of using a law degree, some of which involve very different skills than others. Entering law school with a preliminary theory of how you will use your degree can help you make the most of the time you have in law school to pursue relevant internships, independent projects, and courses.

Some JD students report that their most valuable law school experiences came from self-initiated opportunities outside of class (e.g. clinics, research projects, internships), making it particularly important to have a plan for how you will identify and prioritize projects on object-level questions that are relevant to your interests and goals.

Keep building your subject-matter knowledge

As in other careers, a large fraction of your impact in a low or policy career might depend on developing good judgment about which problems to work on and which opportunities are most promising for addressing them. As time allows given the extremely busy law school curriculum, keep learning about important problems and connecting with people whose work you admire.

Keep an eye out for new opportunities

There are still a relatively small number of law school graduates focusing on neglected issues like emerging technology policy, such as regulating AI or biotechnology, so the exploratory value of trying this path could be high. In some cases, you may be among the first people to give serious consideration to using the law in a particular way.

The legal literacy you gain in law school will also give you a different perspective and skillset from many other people working on important policy problems, which may help you identify opportunities adjacent to existing projects or give advice that increases the effectiveness of others’ efforts.

Footnotes