Law

Training in law is primarily about demonstrating academic excellence. While law schools take some interest in the presence of legally relevant courses on the transcript, their primary concern is with GPA, scores on the LSAT, and evidence of independent intellectual capacity.

We strongly encourage our pre-law students to become Undergraduate Research Fellows. Having won a competitive academic honor is a useful credential. Furthermore, the Undergraduate Research Fellowship offers an unusual opportunity to obtain a scholarly publication while one is still an undergraduate. This is an extremely rare accomplishment. Law reviews are looking for the kind of student who can engage in significant collaborative writing and editing while carrying a full academic load. Being an Undergraduate Research Fellow communicates to a law school that one has the capacity to perform in the upper half of their student body. Note that there is no comparable program in other department in liberal arts at Texas A&M.

Our intellectual training for pre-law emphasizes theory and deduction. We do offer courses in law and social control. These are naturally of great interest to future attorneys. However, law school is primarily about reasoning from principles to arrive at conclusions about concrete cases. Sociological theory is excellent training for your future work in moving from the abstract and conceptual to the empirical and factual.

Core courses include:

SOCI 445: Sociology of Law
SOCI 304: Criminology
SOCI 327: Morality and Society
SOCI 230: Classical Sociological Theory
SOCI 430: Contemporary Sociological Theory
SOCI 411: Social Psychology

Students who anticipate going into corporate practice may want to consider some of the courses that are suggested for our training in business:

Business: Marketing
Business: Human Resources
Business: International Trade
Business: Strategic Leadership

Students who anticipate going into family law should consider taking some gender courses such as:

SOCI 315: Marriage Institution
SOCI 207: Introduction to Gender and Society
SOCI 316: Sociology of Gender

Students may also wish to take helpful courses outside the department in such areas as Political Science, Communications, History, English, and Philosophy. Helpful courses would be based on specialization and can be chosen from any combination of the above-mentioned areas. Students who are preparing to enter into law school are expected to be excellent communicators in written and oral terms, thus this should be considered when choosing applicable courses.