Core skills for law school
Attending law school requires commitment to a rigorous course of study and responsibility. If you plan to attend law school, you should develop these four abilities during your pre-law preparation at NAU.
Communicate
Law students must demonstrate a strong ability to read, write, speak, and listen. If you wish to succeed in law school, your ability to comprehend information and write about it is crucial. Often, you must read large amounts of complex material and use the information to write persuasive documents.
Law students must also present their arguments orally before peers and faculty members. Participation in group projects and leadership positions in student groups will help you develop critical communication skills, including the often-overlooked skill of listening.
Think critically and analytically
As a law student, you will have to evaluate the arguments of your peers, so exposure to new ideas and a strong commitment to reflectively consider your own assumptions will help you understand and analyze different perspectives.
To think “critically” means to:
- consciously raise questions like: “What do we know about…? How do we know? Why do we accept or believe? What is the evidence for…?
- discriminate between observation and inference, between established fact and subsequent conjecture.
- probe for assumptions (particularly the implicit, unarticulated assumptions) behind a line of reasoning.
- draw inferences from data, observations, or other evidence and recognize when firm inferences cannot be drawn. This subsumes a number of processes such as elementary syllogistic reasoning (e.g., dealing with basic propositional “if…then” statements), correlational reasoning, and recognizing when relevant variables have or have not been controlled.
- discriminate between inductive and deductive reasoning—be aware when an argument is being made from the particular to the general or from the general to the particular.
- test one’s own line of reasoning and conclusions for internal consistency and thus develop intellectual self-reliance.
Research
Law students often must gather and make sense of information from many sources, so learning to navigate the research channels at a library as an undergraduate will help you collect and analyze information at law school and other ambitious academic undertakings. Likewise, completing research papers can help you learn to uncover, maneuver through, manage, synthesize, and analyze large amounts of material. NAU provides both Westlaw and HeinOnline to assist students with legal research pertaining to both legal scholarship and federal and state case materials.
Organize and manage
Lawyers frequently must prepare for court cases quickly, so acquiring the ability to rapidly analyze and organize large amounts of complex material will benefit you. By taking challenging courses and completing thought-provoking assignments, you can learn techniques for organizing relevant data while managing tight deadlines.
Exercise these skills through hands-on learning experiences and relevant courses.