Are you contemplating law school? If so, the economics major may be a great path for you to get there! Economics helps build valuable critical thinking and analysis skills prized by law schools. How do we know? Because:
- Economics students are increasingly enrolling in law school.
- Economics students boast the second highest acceptance rates and the highest average LSAT scores out of the thirteen majors who most commonly apply to law school, according to Forbes Best Undergraduate Majors for Law School.
- The economics major is also consistently recommended as a great route toward a law degree from institutions such as College Consensus and Harvard.
- And, perhaps most importantly, the economic mindset is influencing the creation and interpretation of laws across the legal landscape:
“Judges and practitioners increasingly rely on economic reasoning to resolve legal disputes. In some areas of legal practice—especially antitrust law, tax law, bankruptcy, corporate and securities law, and other fields of economic law—economic reasoning is often central to the focus of legal arguments, and it continues to grow in importance in many other seemingly non-economic fields, such as environmental law, intellectual property law, health law, and more.” - Law and Economics JD/PhD at Stanford.
“Lawyers’ guidance of clients’ affairs – ranging from transactions to finance to personal and family arrangements – centrally involves the interaction of economics and the law. Similarly, much litigation and government regulation addresses problems that arise from this interaction.” - Harvard Law School on Law and Economics.
"Economic conditions in the world can play a major role in legal reform. A course like Public Finance covers taxation, unemployment insurance, social security, and regulation and focuses on current policy issues." - Harvard
The economics major helps build logical reasoning, data analysis, research skills, and ability to model/predict human behavior to complement the legal knowledge taught in the Law Studies Minor. If you want to talk more about how the economics major can help you in the pursuit of your law degree, please reach out to our advisors (Debbie.Evercloud@ucdenver.edu or Jim.Smith@ucdenver.edu) to learn more!