Law and Justice Minor
Law and justice is an interdisciplinary minor that includes courses from a wide spectrum of academic departments, including communication, sociology, English, history, business policy, political science, psychology, and philosophy, as well as legal studies courses developed specifically for this program.  It provides students with knowledge and understanding of laws, legal institutions and processes and their relationships to social, moral, political, and economic issues.  Students will benefit from learning to understand law and law enforcement from diverse perspectives.  The law and justice minor will provide students, regardless of specific career goals, with tools for understanding how the law works and its social consequences; it will make students better citizens by demystifying law, legal ideas and concepts and by enabling them critically to evaluate laws, legal institutions and policies.  The minor enables students to focus their course of study around their specific career goals and can be combined with any major program.

Pre-Law Program Overview
            Students interested in legal careers will benefit from the knowledge and skills they can obtain by an in-depth study of law from various disciplinary perspectives available with the legal studies concentration within the law and justice program.  Unlike the traditional undergraduate pre-law programs that are typically singular in perspective or orientation, the minor offers diverse approaches.  As recommended for pre-law study by the Association of American Law Schools, the law and justice minor provides a broad-based curriculum that is designed to develop students’ abilities to formulate ideas and effectively communicate them and to understand and critically assess social institutions, behaviors, and values.  The law and justice minor has the additional advantage of providing an interdisciplinary legal studies approach that will enhance students’ understanding of law and legal issues, institutions and practices.   The law and justice minor provides students with opportunities to explore and test their interest and capacities for law-related careers under the direction and supervision of faculty, by working directly with legal professionals in a law-related institution, by doing field work research in  a legal setting, by engaging in simulated courtroom trials, by practicing alternative forms of dispute resolution, by examining work setting of legal practitioners, or by conducting research on some specific legal issue or aspect of legal work.

Pre-Law Advising
Experienced faculty members of the law and justice program committee advise students expressing an interest in pursuing a career in law or law-related fields.  Faculty advisors assist students in all phases of pre-law preparation from course selection to law school applications.  The law and justice program also sponsors workshops on various aspects of the application process.

For more information on the pre-law program, please contact:
Pamela Brown
Communication/Director, Law & Justice Program
609-896-5107
Office Location: Fine Arts 250
BrownP@rider.edu

Law and Justice Center
To assist students in locating information on  law schools, Rider maintains a Law and Justice Center that houses law school catalogs, application forms, data about law schools, and financial aid material for professional school studies.

Law Society
The Law Society is a student-run organization; faculty provide advice and assistance.  The society sponsors lectures on law and the legal profession, arranges field trips to courts, government agencies, and law schools and has participated in state-wide mock trial competitions.

Courses offered under the pre-law concentration consider such subjects as the nature of law and legal reasoning, constitutional and statutory interpretation, the operation of the federal and state judicial systems, the operation of the criminal justice system, the development and application of the law of civil rights and civil liberties, and the interaction of legal and political considerations in the development and administration of public policy. Students majoring in political science with a pre-law concentration are assigned to work with the department's pre-law advisor.