Post
by Pendulum » Sat Feb 20, 2010 10:51 pm
As an occasional lurker here, I saw that not much has been written here for a while, so I thought I'd put my two cents in as a current first-year.
Overall, my experience here has been positive. One of the previous posts here wrote some criticism, but from a unique circumstance. I consider the education here to be excellent and in general I think the professors here are great instructors. I don't have anything to say about the administration, since like most students I've not really interacted with them.
This school has a reputation of being conservative. Compared to American, it certainly is. But I would say that the student body is only about half conservative (or maybe 60% at most), and only a fraction of that I would consider to be hardcore conservative. There are also some pretty liberal people here as well, and lots of people in the middle if you were to blur the line between liberal and conservative. For that reason, while this school is more conservative than most, I would not personally say that this school represents a narrow band of law students. As one would expect, the in-state population is more liberal than the out-of-state population.
The "law and econ" curriculum... As you've probably already read, law and econ is GMU's strongest point in terms of scholarly research. In a recent internet poll by Leiter, GMU was within the top 10 schools in this field. GMU requires one (and only one) course on applied microeconomics, which consists of 3/15 of your first semester (in terms of credits). Since the economic topics covered are very narrow, I don't think you're disadvantage if you weren't an econ major, as long as you're open to learning about the topic. From what I recall, only 5-10% of the class were econ majors anyways. Since a lot of our law and econ professors teach contracts, you might see some econ in your contracts classes as well. The rest of the curriculum is relatively free of law and econ. In my opinion, I find the law and econ aspect to be useful as a tool to understand the law. In many ways, it does muddle legal analysis, but then again, isn't that the whole point whenever you have a relatively new theoretical approach to old problems.
Our writing program (which takes up 1/6 of your 1L credits) has been mentioned a few times in the previous posts. I would agree with those observations. I think our writing classes are what first years complain about the most in terms of academics, mainly because its graded, and graded by students. The flip side is that the writing program has helped boost our reputation among employers -- at least that is what the administration claims, and I think I believe it. Our writing program also requires some mandatory participation in moot court, though this aspect is not graded.
Coming from a relatively large undergrad with a well-integrated campus, it took a bit to get used to the location style of GMUSL. The downside of having an isolated campus is the lack of certain facilities, such as gyms, but Arlington is a decent neighborhood where you can pretty much find anything you want. The school is very close to the metro, which adds to some flexibility in terms of commuting. Our new building under construction, which will double the physical size of the law school, looks really good and those entering this year will certainly be able to use it by graduation.
As for employment, without drawing on anecdotal evidence, I don't have any good statistics that you can't also find on the internet. I would think that since our main primary market (DC) has not been hit as hard as some of the other ones, and that our main secondary market (Northern VA) is in a state with one of the lowest unemployment rates (6.9, vs 12.4 for CA, for example), the economic problems probably has not had as big of an impact here as it has for other T1s. As with for other schools, the employment stats for the class of 09 will be released later in the year. In any case, the location does have the advantage of allowing students to take fall/spring internships (often for credit) which students of a more rurally located school would not be able to. Semester internships are common among 2Ls and 3Ls.
