Choosing a COLLEGE or UNIVERSITY

At the undergraduate (college) level, a four-year “liberal arts” course of study is traditionally offered which leads to a bachelor of arts (B.A.) degree in such subjects as history, languages and philosophy. (The term “liberal arts” comes from liberals arts, a Latin expression for free, or human. arts and skills. In the time of the Roman Empire, these were skills and arts that only a free person – not a slave – could acquire.) Many liberal arts colleges also offer a bachelor or science (B.S.) degree in physics, chemistry or other subjects. A technical training institution, offering such courses as agriculture or business skills, offers courses of varying length, and community college studies last two years.

Graduate school in America award master’s and doctor’s degrees in both the arts and sciences. (The term “doctor” comes from the Latin word docere, meaning “to teach”.) The courses for most graduate degrees can be completed in two to four years. But if a graduate program requires original research, a student could spend many additional months or even years in a university library or laboratory.

In American university, each college and graduate school has its own curriculum. At the undergraduate level, there may be some courses that every student has to take (for example, classes in world history, math, writing or research). But students do select their “major” (the field in which they want their degree), plus a specific number of “electives” (courses that are not required but that students may choose). The National Institute of Education, a government agency, report that a total of more than 1,000 majors are offered in America’s colleges and universities. The combined electives available in these schools probably amount to a number in the tens of thousands.

Typically, an undergraduate student has to earn a certain number of “credits” (about 120) in order to receive a degree at the end of four years of college. Credits are earned by attending lectures (or lab classes) and by successfully completing assignments and examinations. One credit usually equal one hour of class per week in a single course. A three-credit course in biology could involve two hours of lectures plus one hour in a science lab, every week. A course may last 10 to 16 weeks – the length of a “semester”.

The United States does not have a national (federal) school system, but each of the 50 states operates its own university, and so do some large city governments. (The government does grant degrees in the schools it operates for professional members of the armed services – for example, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.)

About 25 per cent of all schools of higher education in the United States are privately operated by religious organizations. Most are open to students of different faiths, but in some religious schools all students are required to attend religious services. They are also privately owned schools with no religious connection.

Both private and public colleges depend on three sources of income: student tuitions, endowments (gifts made by wealthy benefactors) and government funding. Some endowments are very large: Harvard, Princeton and Yale Universities have more than a thousand million dollars each. Public institutions receive a larger portion of public tax moneys than do private schools.

There are many small American colleges – some with fewer than 100 students. But the larger universities tend to keep attracting larger numbers of enrollment.

They offer the best libraries and facilities for scientific research. Access to a “mainframe” (very larger) computer and to modern laboratories attracts leading scientists to the faculties of such schools. And students enroll to study with the experts. Research programs continue to be important to the reputation of America’s universities. But in recent years, the percentage of advanced degrees awarded in the “pure” (research) sciences has defined. The same has been true for the liberal arts. Students continue to seek the largest, most respected universities – but for new and different programs.

TEXT D

LEGAL EDUCATION IN THE USA

GENERAL FEATURES

What does it mean to study law in the United States? The study of law for more than 125,000 law students today means study in one of over 170 law schools that have been approved by the American Bar Association (ABA). Most lawyers currently admitted to practice hold degrees from these schools. But because the number of institutions is large and because there is no federal control of education, the diversity among these institutions is much greater than in countries where the number of law faculties is smaller or where there is some regulation by the national government.

Most law schools are part of a university. The university may be private, with no state connection, as are Columbia, Harvard and Yale, or it may be supported by one of the fifty states, as are California, Michigan and Virginia. The school may be regarded as a «local» law school in the sense that its students come from and intend to practice in the region where it is located and there is a tendency to emphasize local law on problems of particular significance to the area. It may be also one of the «national» law schools which, like the six just mentioned, attempts to prepare its graduates more generally for practice in any state.

It may have only a full-time program of study lasting for 3 years, or it may also have a part-time program, usually of evening study, requiring a longer time. It may be one of the few law schools with more than 1,500 students or one of the handful with less than 300.

Yet in spite of the great variety in American law schools, there are several common characteristics that distinguish them from their sister institutions in most of the rest of the world. The most striking of them are: the admission to a law school, the process of education, the methods of teaching and others.

THE HISTORY OF LEGAL EDUCATION

Early legal education in America was primarily apprentice work. For example, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton both «read law» with older lawyers. George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave the first systematic training in law. His students included John Marshall, James Monroe and Edmund Randolph. Wythe's lectures were based on Blackstone's commentaries on English common law.

In 1784 Judge Tapping Reeve, who had previously had individual pupils, including Aaron Burr, founded a law school at Litchfield, Conn. The school continued for nearly 50 years, and its' more than 1,000 students had a great impact on American Law.

In 1817 the Harvard Law School was established, and it is now the oldest law school in the United States. In 1829, Joseph Story, then a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, became a professor at Harvard Law School. It immediately acquired a distinguished character and soon attracted students from all parts of the country, thus becoming a «national» law school. During the 19th century, other law schools were established, and legal education in law school slowly came to replace apprentice work as the normal way of training.

In their early days, law schools had proceeded by textbook and lecture, although moot courts were frequently utilized for practice. A major change came in 1870 when Christopher Columbus Langdell, newly appointed as the first dean of the Harvard Law School, introduced the case method of instruction. Langdell was influenced by the scientific thought of his time, and he regarded the law library as the close laboratory of the law school. He felt that through the close and detailed study of cases the student could learn the principles and historical development of the law.

Over the next generation, the case method came to replace the lecture method, and it was dominant in American law schools during the first half of the 20th century. Although the case method is primarily based on the study of cases, it is essentially the problem method. Instead of studying general principles from books and then deducing specific conclusions, the student is led to study in detail a large number of specific instances that have been considered by the courts. Then s/he is supposed to construct from the results reached in these instances such principles as he may feel are applicable.

In the 20th century there was an increasing dissatisfaction with the case method, particularly in its more rigid forms. It does not, for example, give adequate recognition to the part played by legislation in the development of law. It also has been contended that the case method does not adequately lend itself to bringing into legal discussions knowledge from other fields, such as economics and sociology, which are highly relevant in the consideration of modern legal problems. Finally, the case method ignores the role of the facts in legal controversies. This leaves the students unprepared for a large part of a lawyer's work, which consists of ascertaining the facts and in negotiation.

For these reasons among others, recent decades have witnessed a decline in popularity of the case method, especially in the second and third years. So, the efforts to instruct by clinical methods were involved. These efforts take two forms. In one, students are presented with factual situation and asked to develop evidence, give counsel, and take appropriate procedural steps. The basic effort is to expose students to the realities of law practice in a controlled context so that they will learn both by doing and by criticism of what they do. The other form taken by clinical legal education is far less structured: students are thrown into actual cases and allowed, with some supervision, to handle the matter. This approach has the advantage, of course, of actuality and realism. However, it suffers from the fact that life rarely presents itself in the way best suited to pedagogical purposes. It remains to be seen what place these two forms of clinical education will come to occupy in American legal education.

ADMISSION TO A LAW SCHOOL

If you want to enter a law school in the United States it is necessary to study first at the college or university for 4 years. Accordingly, American students rarely begin legal studies before the age of 23 or 24, and many are substantially older. Second, the candidate is supposed to have a university transcript of his grades and a B.A. or B.Sc. degrees. Third, s/he has to pass the «Law School Admission Test». Actually, you do not pass or fail the LSAT -you get ranked against all other law school candidates. Those are the «points-rankings» and schools can then set minimum scores. This test checks the logical and analytical skills, the ability to give arguments, to make conclusions, to analyze texts, etc. Forth, every law school requires a certain number of points which would-be student should have. It is obvious that the best and most prestigious law schools have very tough requirements. Finally, some law schools take into consideration the patterns of the written papers of the candidates, which they did in the university, the grades of the basic subjects, as well as recommendations of professors and scholars.

THE PROCESS OF EDUCATION

Education in every law school lasts 3 years. For example, at Harvard the educational year consists of 3 trimesters: fall- 3,5 months, winter- 3,4 weeks (brief, but very intensive) and spring- 4 months. The first year curriculum is largely or entirely prescribed. The major part of the program consists of Common law courses: contracts, property and tort. Instruction is also given in civil procedure, usually taking the federal rules of civil procedureas the basis for instruction, and criminal law, including relevant constitutional protections. Some schools offer a general constitutional law course in the first year/ Others, give students in the second half of the year a choice among a variety of subjects such as constitutional law, legal philosophy, and administrative law. Classroom instruction is typically supplemented by work in legal writing and analysis, taught in relatively small groups. And most law schools have a moot-court competition in which first-year students are given the opportunity to brief and argue a case before a court constituted of older students and teachers.

In the second and third years of studies, it is the student who chooses the courses which s/he wants to study. For example, at Harvard, this choice of courses has to correspond to the following conditions: during these two years the student has to get 52 points (every course gives from 1 to 5 points, depending on the number of hours). It is also desirable that the student chooses at least one course, where a lot of attention is paid to practical work (the work at legal offices, legal aid to poor people, etc.). Finally, during the 3 years the student has to get at least two points for taking the courses that are devoted to professional responsibilities and professional ethics. The student is also obliged to write a research paper in the 2^nd and 3^rd years of studies.

During these three years a lot of students work on the editorial staff of the legal journal of law school or just write articles to It. The admission to the editorial board is competitive and complicated. Being Editor-in-chief of the journal is considered to be very prestigious. The oldest American law review is that at Harvard, established by students in 1877. Today, more or less similar publications are found at a great many law schools. In the case of journals such as the Harvard Law Review, the editing is done entirely by law students, free from faculty control. The lead articles in these journals are selected by the student editors from among manuscripts submitted by distinguished legal scholars and lawyers. Each issue also includes a substantial amount of student writing, usually taking the form either of a treatment of an area of the law or of a sharply focused discussion of a recent decision or a recent piece of legislation. These student edited journals havelong been the most important American professional legal periodicals.

Exams are the major form of control in an American law school. They are held anonymously and the professor knows only the personal number of the student whose work s/he marks. All exams are done in writing. At the exam all the students receive the same task, which is photocopied. It may consist of an invented situation or a real case from American legal practice. The student can also be asked to give a brief definition of some notions or pick the right answer in the multiple-choice test. At the same time law schools exams most often consist of essay responses to complex factual problems. Students are expected to identify the relevant legal issues and apply legal concepts in order to predict the likely outcome of the case. The kinds of questions you describe are used to test understanding of rules (such as the rules of evidence, for example) but they are usually used in combination with essay examinations.

The professor chooses the type of exam and prepares the tasks and checks the answers by himself. The exams can be held at the university and last from 1.5 hours to several hours. The examination task can be given home for the whole day and in certain courses even for several days. Any consultations among the students are strongly prohibited.

Over the decades, there have been many changes in he form in which grades are given. At Harvard, formerly all grades were numerical and the class was ranked in order from top to bottom. Later, class rankings have been dropped and letter grades have beer substituted for numerical grades. So, at the moment the results of exams are evaluared by two different systems. According to the first, the results are marked by the letters: A+ (the highest). A, A-, B+, B, B-, C, D, F (the lowest- fail). For the students, who studied basic courses, the minimum average mark is a certain combination of B-, C and D. For the candidates for M.Sc./ M.A. degrees the requirements are more severe- the minimum grade is B-. According to the second system, the answers are evaluated with the marks «pass» or «fail» and this system was very popular in the past. But now the system pass/fail is much less popular even than it was 10 years ago. Some professors offer the choice between the exam and a written paper and there are also some cases when besides the exam throughout the seminars it is necessary to fulfil several written tasks.

Textbooks in the forms of readers containing case studies, laws and doctrinal sources with comments, chosen by the professor are used during the period of studies in American law school. The obligatory condition is the knowledge of the primary source and the decisions of the courts, in particular. All professors have also their own list of sources, which the students are supposed to read.

The libraries of law schools in the United States are big and rich with legal books and materials. Now, for example, in the Harvard Law School there are about 1 800 students and 68 professors. They can both use the library of the school, which has about 1,450,000 books. In one place (Langdell Hall) the sources of the Anglo-American system of law are collected, and in the collection of the Center of international legal research you can find materials about international and comparative law. In the library there are also terminals, where the students can get the information from the biggest electronic sets of legal information — WEST LAW and LEXIS/NEXUS. During the period of education students can use these sources without payment and at home.

CONSULTING JOB OPPORTUNITIES

In the United States the proper initiative of students who are looking for a job is complemented with the help of a Career Services office. This Department collects and publishes a journal, which contains the information about all the students every year. This edition is sent to the law firms, the governmental institutions and other organizations, which later on organized individual interviews with the appropriate candidates. This Department also publishes a journal, where there is information about the legal offices, governmental agencies, and international organizations. This journal is distributed among the students, so they have a real wide choice. The staff of this office usually works closely with individual students to help them to prepare their resumes, learn the skill of interviewing effectively as job candidates, and determine the type of employment the student wishes to pursue.

There are some factors, which make the possibility to find a good job higher. Among them are: summer work as a legal officer, experience of the clinical courses, participation in the work of the editorial board of a legal journal of school, as well as high grades.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1469