Science Student Aspiring To Pursue Law? Here Are A Few Tips

Science students who aspire to pursue Law often worry if they have what it takes to be good lawyers, and their worry is not without cause. Anybody who says any different is led by the admirable desire to be helpful but is perhaps led by the well-meaning tool of deception. They are not so naive as to think that a Science background is even remotely designed to prepare students for a career in law.

Having a Science background helps one with Legal Studies just as much as any other background does. This means that Science students, like students coming from other academic backgrounds, have a few things going for them due to their past academic training, while also being beset with certain underdeveloped skills, precisely because they have been academically trained to pursue a career in fields other than Law.

Also Read | Your Stream Need Not Limit Your Career Options: Check Out Some Real-Life Stories

We need to first understand and acknowledge the simple fact that while there are a few downsides to aspiring for a career in Law with an academic background in Science, there are also a few upsides.

But let’s understand, to begin with, what we are talking about here and what we aren’t. We ARE talking about what helps a Science student study Law better, and what skills they would need to improve to be a better student. What we are NOT talking about is the career options in Law for a student with a Science background. These are two related but distinct topics and need to be covered at length separately.

What A Science Background Brings To The Table

Let’s begin by being realistic, shall we? Here are a few fundamental ideas that Science students aspiring to pursue law should practically align with.

You Are Not Superior To The Rest

Being a Science student does not make you a genius at deductive reasoning beyond the use of the formulae you have been taught to obtain a solution to a problem set. So, for all the admiring looks that your relatives cast your way for being a Science student (thus, presumably intelligent in their eyes), you are not a great deal better than the next student when it comes to making smart deductions from a set of theoretical assumptions. Yes, I understand that something in you, largely driven by ego, wants to challenge this ‘stereotype’. But that’s not really the stereotype; the stereotype is that Science students are exceptionally intelligent, evident in their being Science students, and can excel at just about anything they choose to do. Partly true, mostly false.

In fact, I believe, when people consider and characterise Science students as ‘more intelligent’ than ‘others’ and look upon them with greater respect and expectation, they do injustice to the ‘others’ just as well as to the supposedly ‘more intelligent’, because repeated suggestions of natural intellectual superiority make Science students expect way more of themselves than reasonable. The fact is that an overwhelming majority of students are more or less equally intelligent with different intellectual leanings.

Each Stream Adds Value

Science students, by virtue of their training in problem-solving, have better analytical ability whereas students from other streams, like Humanities, tend to have better conceptual understanding and articulation. Law requires analytical abilities, conceptual understanding, and articulation in about equal measure. So, naturally, students coming from any of the streams, Science included, bring something to the table and have to get better at the rest.

Also Read | Is It Time We Give The Humanities Their Much Deserved Accolade?

Science Helps In Problem-Solving And Analyses

The ability to strip the problem down to the most relevant aspects so that one can come up with a solution is an intellectual skill that a Law student is supposed to have, in order to have a reasonably good understanding of the law, and this is exactly the kind of thinking that a Science student brings to the table. That’s because all through their academic lives they have been dealing with problems starting with Meera and Mohan having a certain number of oranges or apples; two trains travelling in opposite directions relative to each other at certain velocities, and they understand that Meera or Mohan or the train stations are irrelevant because it’s not about the stories (where the trains are coming from or going to) or the characters (Meera and Mohan), but about the numbers and what mathematical or physical fact is revealed by their relationship with each other, and how that relationship is discovered, or what makes it evident.

To put it differently, if Mohan snatches four of the six oranges Meera has, there is injustice and a crime committed, but there are also two oranges left in Meera’s hands, and which fact needs to be focused on depends upon the question to be answered. And Science students can be particularly good at understanding that, which is their advantage. However, laws have human purposes to serve and the courts have to ensure that in each case justice is done in accordance with the law. This is why there are courts with human judges weighing carefully the facts of each case to arrive at the decision that would best serve the cause of justice within the parameters laid down by the law. So while cold reason has its place, empathy, and an inherent sense of justice are also just as important in the larger scheme of things.

Empathy Is As Crucial As Reason In Law

Also Read | Why Having A Value System Is Indispensable

Science Helps To Look For Rationale

Science background also enables one to look for rational causal explanations for the occurrences, which means that Science students are more inclined toward evidence-based conclusions, and have a good eye for catching over-generalisations, which happen to be the error that human beings are most generally prone to. To say that they have a good sense of it does not mean that Science students are completely immune to it, or are extraordinarily good at avoiding them. They aren’t because most of the students fail to apply what they learn in the classrooms to life in general unless they have had the good fortune of having a teacher who specifically teaches them how to.

Things To Learn

Having discussed at length what all are the things that having a Science background brings to the table in terms of the pursuit of Law, let us now look at the things a Science student who aspires to study law needs to focus on learning.

Articulating Precisely

As a Science student, you might be better at analytical reasoning and may also have, by way of luck or upbringing or general social environment, the requisite amount of empathy. But even these two together are not enough, for you also need the ability to see the same situation from multiple perspectives. Along with this, you need the skill to articulate your thoughts clearly and precisely, and those two things are not easy to come by.

Good Language

The students with a Science background who make better Law students are generally those who have a certain degree of language abilities, which include not only reading and comprehending written text quickly, but also putting thoughts into the right words, both verbally and textually, even if the words used are simple and the sentence structure ordinary, for clarity is way more important than the fanciness of expression, which, in certain situations, might even be counterproductive.

Linguistic ability is natural only to a limited extent, and one has to put in considerable work to have better communication skills. Besides, even if you have linguistic abilities naturally, they wouldn’t be much help unless you polish them to be adaptable and optimisable for different tasks.

How To Develop The Required Skills

This might sound a bit complicated at first and would also require some long-term effort on your part, but this is the most effective way of developing the skills to pursue Law, which you might lack as a Science student.

Analysing Newspaper Articles

Take a newspaper article on a subject of your liking, read it carefully, look for the conclusion it draws, and then look for the facts it bases those conclusions upon. Make a note of it. Look for another article on the same issue and perform the same exercise of noting down the factual assumptions and the conclusions it draws. Compare the difference in the conclusions drawn, and look for the factual assumptions cited by the articles that could be responsible for the difference. You are most likely to find that the difference in the conclusions is on account of at least one author’s laying greater emphasis on one set of facts over other relevant facts, for reasons unclear and uncited, unless the two articles are talking about two different aspects of the same issue. You probably wouldn’t see the benefits of the exercise immediately because this is not a shortcut; it's a long-term training exercise, so you’ll have to stick with it for a while.

Critical Reasoning Questions

The above approach may not work for everybody, and if it doesn’t seem to be working for you after you have put in some time and effort into it, you may start a notch lower and work upwards. Pick one of those guide books that have critical reasoning questions, and try solving them. They would help you understand how arguments are built and how to dismantle them to see their component parts. These problems are helpful because they are designed to make the component parts stand out. Given your background in science, once you see what goes into the making of the arguments, chances are, you’ll be able to work your way through them like you did through your problem sets in Science or Mathematics. And then, you can proceed to the articles on complicated real-life subjects and go forward from there. That should help.

Also Read | Skills To Develop For Better Learning At Law College

The legal profession is quite demanding in terms of the abilities it needs for one to succeed, but your academic background, Science or any other, gives you certain advantages, and the best you can do is play to your strengths, develop additional abilities, and see where it takes you.

HemRaj Singh is a Delhi-based trial lawyer, specialising in both civil and criminal trials, and writes mainly on Law, Policy, Diplomacy, and International Relations. Apart from writing for magazines and websites (including Careers360), practising Law and teaching Legal Reasoning and Critical Reasoning, he is Editor-at-Large with “Lawyers Update”, a monthly magazine on law and legal affairs, and was Legal Editor with Universal Law Publishing Company before he started practising Law.