Earlham College | Legal Studies

“The law is a liberal arts calling … The well-equipped lawyer today needs to have a broad-gauged, value-based, and up-to-date understanding of the context in which legal transactions occur and legal disputes arise to be a truly effective advocate and counselor. Earlham provides the perspective and training to help one acquire this understanding.”

Thomas Gottschalk ’64
Senior Vice President
and General Counsel,
General Motors Corporation

At Earlham College, we teach law to expand our students’ vision as citizens as well as to enhance their career choices. Today’s citizen, just as today’s lawyer, needs an understanding of law to function effectively in a world where law is a constant reality. So we teach law as a liberal art — important as an intellectual subject: a social, political and economic tool: and as preprofessional preparation for careers in the law.

Earlham offers Legal Studies as a minor field of study rather than a major. Law schools tell us that there is no particular undergraduate major that best prepares students for law school. Earlham’s Legal Studies Program is therefore compatible with all majors, letting our students pursue a full liberal arts education. Of course, the program also prepares students for law school should some choose to pursue law as a career. A liberal arts college does not teach philosophy or music or biology primarily because they lead to particular careers, but because these fields are relevant to any serious effort to live a full and useful life. Law is a central liberal art in this sense, and that is how we seek to teach it.

For pre-law students Legal Studies provides an informed and realistic sense of what law is and how it functions in society. We study the history, politics and ethics of the law, and ask continually what the law ought to be. So our minor in Legal Studies helps to produce lawyers who are well-rounded, liberally educated, ethically sensitive and prepared for a changing world.

We would be sorry, however, if our program were chosen only by students planning to go to law school. For us, undergraduate legal education offers a special entree to moral and political education. To study law is to study rights and duties, ways of making change happen, structures and functions of government, “the rules of the game.” This knowledge should be widely shared in a democracy, not limited to a professional class of lawyers. We do not claim that law is relevant to every career, although in fact there is hardly a human activity not regulated or influenced by law. We do claim, however, that law affects all of us profoundly in our everyday and professional lives and, if we take responsibility for it, we can in turn affect the law profoundly. This is reason enough for all of us to learn something about law.