Guidance for Course Selection 

To help our students make the best choices as to which electives to take, we have created tables which list courses within the most popular areas of concentration and rank these courses as either highly recommended for students choosing to focus in a particular area or optional depending on your individual interests. The tables also note prerequisites and whether a course is best taken at a particular stage of your law school career.

View Tables

In general, you should focus on taking the core courses in the area in which you wish to concentrate as early in your law school career as possible. A good rule of thumb should be that you should take an elective that interests you when it appears on the schedule. Although many electives are offered on an annual basis, various factors affect the availability of electives. There is no guarantee that any particular elective will appear on the schedule more than once during your law school career.

In addition to the courses listed, students should consider pursuing (a) an externship that will enable the student to earn credit by working in a particular area of concentration; and/or (b) develop an individual directed study project in the area of concentration to be supervised by a full-time faculty member.

Students pursuing a general litigation or alternative dispute resolution concentration, or students pursuing another area in which dispute resolution skills play a dominant role, such as criminal law or constitutional law and civil rights, should consider trying out for one of the TJSL competition teams.

If you have questions about what courses to take, please contact the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, the Director of Academic Administration, or a professor with teaching or scholarly interests in the area.

The tables are in PDF format, please download the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe to view them.