Do Undergraduate Majors Correlate Highly with Success in Legal Writing Classes?
Abstract
The article relates my conclusions stemming from over a decade of compiling statistics related to the backgrounds of my students in first year Legal Writing. Over the course of many years, I compiled information related to age, undergraduate degree, and college attended (public v. private) in an effort to determine whether there was an indicator of potential success in mastering Legal Writing concepts. I thought that if I could correlate a particular undergraduate major with success in Legal Writing, I could tailor my teaching in such a way that I could fill in the gaps that other students might have had when entering law school. The article reaches a few interesting conclusions in terms of predictable performance. I also discovered, although more anecdotally than scientifically, that success in Legal Writing does correlate to success in law school. Thus, any conclusions reached about the characteristics of students with the most potential for success in Legal Writing also extends to overall success in law school.