The College Fix

Starting this spring, students at the University of Arizona can pursue an undergraduate degree in law – the first of its kind in the country.

By letting students start their legal studies earlier, undergraduates will be able to “hit the ground running” after graduation, Najwa Nabti, director of undergraduate studies at the law school, told The College Fix.

As a prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal in the Netherlands for the past seven years, Nabti said she noticed American law students were “a bit disadvantaged” in the job marketplace relative to international counterparts, who started their law studies as undergrads.

“In basically any career field now, you’re exposed to the law, and so providing students with some background in legal education at an earlier stage makes them more marketable,” Nabti said. “We are really trying to teach core concepts, analytical and critical thinking skills … trying to teach students to think like a lawyer even if they’re not practicing law.”

Students in the program will learn about “property, contracts, torts, constitutional law, administrative law, and criminal and civil procedure,” and they can use the degree as an FBI agent, lobbyist, police officer, social worker and journalist among other fields, the degree’s informational brochure states. 

“Academically talented” undergrads can also get their graduate degree in law in as little as six years, rather than the usual seven, through an accelerated option. Students would take 30 graduate-level law credits their senior year, as if they were first-year law students, and the rest during their fifth and sixth years. 

The accelerated track “saves them a year of investing that extra time and tuition” for students who want their juris doctor, Nabti said.

There are no prerequisites to declare the major, but to take upper-division law classes, students must have a 3.0 GPA in four out of the five classes offered by the School of Government and Public Policy, including economics, introductory statistics and American government.

Students will go beyond learning from textbooks and lectures, to “a workshop component where [students] can actually start applying those concepts,” Nabti said.

Professor James Diamond, who has 25 years of experience in law and is handling the workshops, said the role-playing would prepare students to critically think about how to deal with legal situations. 

Once a week, students will take assignments out of the cases they have studied and “will have to speak and analyze strategies,” and “formulate methods for handling problems that come up in the law,” Diamond told The College Fix.

Students in the program can also earn academic credit for internships with governmental agencies and other public institutions, “where they will receive hands-on training in law-related fields,” the brochure states. 

“Students can basically try out a particular career track before they graduate,” Nabti said, “so when they graduate with their bachelor’s degree they have some idea about whether they want to go on” to get a master’s degree, a graduate law degree “and actually practice law, or whether they want to go work for a few years and just go from there.”

College Fix contributor Julianne Stanford is a student at the University of Arizona.

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