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I lived and worked in China and I want to study mandarin in law school. Does anyone know how law schools or legal employers look at this? I am worried it would look like was unfocused or didn't have the ambition or interest in really practicing law. I have a lot of lawyers in my family and they encourage it but seem a little ambivalant. I do not want to pracitce law in China long term but I do hope maintaining my language skills will help open doors in the future. Any relevant thoughts?

You won't have time 1L. Theoretically you could take classes 2L and 3L, but Mandarin's a difficult language, your grades would probably suffer. If you're already pretty good at Mandarin though (it wasn't clear from your post what your level is) and you just want to maintain, not improve, your ability, you could get tutoring for an hour or so a week just to keep in practice. I wouldn't recommend doing more than this.

I think you'll have plenty of time, law school is just knowing how to use your time constructively. Just audit a class at the undergrad associated with your law school. If you're too busy, you can just skip out and don't have to worry about failing.

cinephile wrote:I think you'll have plenty of time, law school is just knowing how to use your time constructively. Just audit a class at the undergrad associated with your law school. If you're too busy, you can just skip out and don't have to worry about failing.

Check to make sure the school actually lets you do this. Many schools don't let people audit some classes, especially language classes (which they have to keep small).