structural:scholar_edition, information:highlighting, quality:correction
Education and training

The educational prerequisites for becoming a lawyer vary greatly across countries. In some countries, law is an undergraduate degree culminating in a bachelors or masters degree in law. In some of these jurisdictions, it is common or even required for students to earn another bachelor's degree at the same time. Where law is taught as an undergraduate degree, legal training after law school may comprise advanced examinations, apprenticeships, and additional coursework at special government institutes. For example, in many English common law jurisdictions, individuals with a law degree have to undergo further education and professional training before qualifying as a lawyer, such as the Bar Professional Training Course.

In other jurisdictions, particularly the United States and Canada, law is taught at the graduate level following the completion of an unrelated bachelors degree. In America, the American Bar Association decides which law schools to approve for the purposes of admission to the bar. Law schools in the United States and Canada award graduating students a J.D. (Juris Doctor) as a professional law degree. In a handful of U.S. states, one may become an attorney (a so-called country lawyer) by simply " reading law " and passing the bar examination, without having to attend law school first, although very few people actually become lawyers that way.

The methods and quality of legal education vary widely. Some countries require extensive clinical training in the form of apprenticeships or special clinical courses. Others, like Venezuela, do not. A few countries prefer to teach through assigned readings of judicial opinions (the casebook method) followed by intense in-class cross-examination by the professor (the Socratic method). Many others focus on theoretical aspects of law, leaving the professional and practical training of lawyers to apprenticeship and employment contexts.

Some countries, particularly industrialized ones, have a traditional preference for full-time law programs, while in developing countries, students often work full- or part-time to pay the tuition and fees of their part-time law programs. Law schools in developing countries share several common problems, such as an over reliance on practicing judges and lawyers who treat teaching as a part-time commitment, a concomitant scarcity of full-time law professors), incompetent faculty with underqualified credentials, and textbooks that lag behind the current state of the law.