LawSchools.com Contributing Writer
May 26, 2006
Law Education Over the Internet: How It Works
Typically, two main types of law degree are available online: The main Juris Doctor (J.D.), which is necessary to become an attorney in general practice, and the Legum Magister (Master of Laws, LL.M.) that certifies your knowledge of a legal specialty. You'll need an existing undergraduate degree to start either track. Once you register and the classes you enroll in get started, you can begin accessing course content: Most programs will also require you to buy some physical casebooks from online bookstores. “The law environment has been slow to move to e-books,” laments Barry Currier, Dean of Concord Law School. Fisher-Ogden mentions that although ALU students will need casebooks, they also have access to Westlaw, which is “equivalent to a nine-story law library.” One exception is the Novus University School of Law, which eschews most casebooks in favor of LexisNexis. Novus' General Counsel, Jay Thomas, J.D., says their students go online to “research the cases and the conflicts between cases and jurisdictions.”
The Offering Institutions
Compared to many other fields of study, not many schools or other institutions offer legal education over the Internet, for reasons I'll explain in the “Career” section below. Besides the schools listed above, here are a few organizations that provide credit and noncredit law education:
Paying for Online Law Education
“The cost of legal education is one of the things that bothers me the most as a legal educator,” says Currier. At Harvard Law School, for example, 2005/06 per-year tuition is listed as $35,100 and single-student living expenses are estimated at $21,600. Fortunately, the online programs bring this way down. At the schools whose personnel I talked to, tuition costs for the current year ranged from a low of $5,000 to a high of only $8,300. Sadly, however, even though most of these schools are accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC) http://www.detc.org, their students aren't eligible for most federal financial aid, and some don't even have financial-aid offices. But other funding might be available, depending on the institution and on your circumstances, including:
Learning Law Online and Your Career
Here's the sticky wicket. Standard 306 (Distance Education) of the Standards for Approval of Law Schools of the American Bar Association contains the following provisions:
Furthermore, Section 6-8 of the bylaws of the American Association of Law Schools requires its member institutions to maintain a “brick-and-mortar” physical library. Because of these requirements, none of the primarily online J.D. programs are currently ABA or AALS accredited or sanctioned, meaning that graduating from such a program doesn't qualify you to take the bar exam in most states. The exception is California, which Fisher-Ogden singles out as having a “uniquely open” system. People with J.D.s earned primarily online are free to take the California bar; if you pass, you have several options: Besides the “California route,” Currier mentions other alternatives that online J.D. graduates have: “You can go into patent law, practice certain specialties in federal courts, or become an in-house corporate counsel.” When asked whether the policies of the accrediting bodies are liable to change, to allow more recognition of (and wider opportunities for) graduates of online J.D. programs in the short or long term, Currier replies, “Yes -- the only question is, in which term? If people look at what we're doing, they'll see that it's sound. We just have to get their attention.” Online LL.M. programs don't have this difficulty, says Kochenberger: “Accreditation is more flexible than for the J.D.” He adds that many students in UConn's insurance LL.M. “already work in insurance” and are pursuing the degree for “professional development.” Graduates of the program, he says, can find work with “risk-management departments, law firms representing or suing insurance companies, or insurance regulators.”
Conclusion
Given the challenges that can face students pursuing this type of education, why would you want to do so? “Legal education is the most valuable education you can get after a bachelor's degree, even more so than an M.B.A.,” asserts Thomas. And why do it online? Fisher-Ogden captures the raison d'être of online law schools when she says, “The law is an integral part of American society, so having legal knowledge is a way to help people. We supply legal education to those who might otherwise be unable to get it.” In other words: In democracies with a rule of law, there's simply no more democratic way of learning the rules.
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