Click a pathway from Choose Your Pathway to find materials designed to help you chart your individual path through law school and to the profession of law, after completing the first year of required courses. Remember, you can take elements from multiple pathways or change direction to a different pathway if you find a new approach that serves your goals. There is no one right way; rather, these materials are intended to give you ideas and information to help prioritize and sequence your law school coursework.
The 
help icon in the upper-left of pathway pages will return to this page.
Each Pathway Contains
About this pathway
An opening page telling you something about the pathway and providing a list of faculty who can provide information about the pathway in general or about particular pathway courses. You may also find links to resources, news, events and activities of particular interest.
Part of a Pathway Guide
The Pathway Guide
These flow charts show “core” and “recommended” courses to consider in the first, second, third and sometimes fourth semester along a pathway. There are also links to “other courses to consider,” which aren’t themselves pathway courses but may be of particular interest to students interested in exploring the pathway in which they are listed. Do not expect to take all pathway courses or even to take all core courses! Many considerations, including your interests and scheduling constraints, will determine which courses and how many courses to take.
» See more about using Pathway Guides below...
Pathway sample schedules
These show when (and how many) pathway courses might be taken in the context of other required and helpful courses. There are sample schedules for part-time and full-time students. The samples are just samples—do not expect to take all the same courses in exactly the same semester. You are very likely to take fewer pathway courses than are reflected on the sample schedules and to take them in different semesters, especially if you come to a pathway after the first semester of second year.
Blank, build-your-own sample schedules
Print, take notes about courses you would like to consider taking, and place them in a sample schedule.
Using The Pathway Guides
- Core and Other Courses
-
Core courses are those that are most closely related to the pathway. Recommended courses are also related to the pathway but aren’t as central as the core courses. Faculty members teaching in each area have created these distinctions to help you prioritize among pathway courses; however, what is most important for you to take also depends on your particular goals.
The course icons
Every course is linked to its course description as well as information about prerequisites, number of credits and when the course is generally offered. Colorful symbols identify courses required to graduate (“required courses”), courses helping you prepare for the Minnesota bar examination (“bar courses”), courses meeting the statutory course requirement (“statutory courses”), courses meeting the advanced skills course requirement (“skills courses”) and courses in which you may be able to complete the advanced research and writing requirement (“long paper courses”).
The pathway guides are designed to allow you to begin a pathway at any point in your law school career, and to facilitate changing from one pathway to another or even working on more than one pathway at a time. You may begin the first semester of a pathway in fall of your second year at Mitchell, or you may come to the pathway later on. Whenever you decide to explore a pathway, begin by considering the courses listed in the first semester of that pathway. How many pathway courses you end up taking will of course depend on how many semesters of law school remain and many other considerations.
- Pre/co-requisites
-
Courses listed in the first semester tend to be those that serve as prerequisites to other courses or are most central to the pathway. Therefore we recommend considering those courses earlier on. Courses listed in the third (and occasionally fourth) semester are courses you should generally expect to take in the last year of law school. Courses listed in the second semester typically have prerequisites that prevent taking them earlier, and they may also serve as prerequisites to courses in the third (or later) semester.
The flowcharts include lines and interactive highlighting linking pathway courses with their prerequisites (or co-requisites). The pre/co-requisite courses are to the left of the course(s) to which they lead (and this sequencing is also indicated by the 1st, 2nd and 3rd semester headings). Solid lines link required pre/co-requisites. Dotted lines link recommended pre/co-requisites. Be careful to check course descriptions for exact details regarding pre/co-requisites.
Don’t expect to take all the pathway courses in the semester in which they are listed or even to take all the first semester courses before all the second semester courses (and so on). First, there are usually too many courses listed to fit into a single semester. (It’s helpful to have more courses than you need going into registration in case courses fill or are offered at inconvenient times.) Moreover, you may end up taking a course listed in the second semester before a course listed in the first semester. That’s fine as long as you meet any pre/co-requisite requirements.
© Copyright 2007 William Mitchell College of Law