What You Need To Know About Law Specializations

During your law studies, electives will prepare you for practice in various legal fields. However, it is you who needs to choose your own specialization.

Now, take a look and try to determine which specialization would fit you best.

Admiralty Law Specialization

Admiralty law is the body of law that covers maritime questions and offenses. The most common topics this law governs over are shipping, waters, navigation, and piracy. If you did not get it by now, it is basically a body of law that deals with matters of marine commerce and transportation of people and goods by sea.

Admiralty law is a very distinctive branch. Currently, it falls within the jurisdiction of the federal district courts. Another distinctive characteristic is the fact that ships are ruled by the country they came from. The courts actually state that the ship’s flag is to show the source country of the law. This rule is applied regardless of the waters the ship is in, however, U.S. courts have the option to refuse to honor the laws of other countries.

Business Law

Business law is tasked with dealing with commerce and industry. This is an incredibly wide body of law and it has multiple areas of expertise. But, it can generally be divided into small business law and corporate law.  The small business law deals with legal counsel that is needed to run a business, like tax classifications, hiring people and licensing needed to start a business. Corporate law, however, is likely to deal with finances and structural statuses of established companies.

Constitutional Law

This area of the law defines the powers, roles, and structures of entities of within the state. It is considered as being one of the broadest branches of law and it requires an almost perfect understanding of the Constitution of the United States of America. If you choose this specialization you would eventually be good enough to understand every possible interpretation and implementation of the Constitution. Another important role of this body of law is to preserve the relationships between the federal governments and state governments (as well as relationships between different state governments).

Criminal Law

To put it simply, criminal law is the body of law that deals with anything related to crime. It revolves around the prosecution of anyone who has committed a criminal act. Criminal law has five main objectives. Those are to punish, offer retribution, deter, incapacitate, rehabilitate and restore.

Environmental Law

Back in the 1970s, a group of federal enactments forced agencies, corporations, and business to take care of the effects their practices have on the environment.

Thanks to the environmental law, we now have laws and standards that protect the environment from negatively affecting private and public actions.

The First Amendment Law

Those lawyers that choose to specialize in cases involving the First Amendment focus on the rights of the citizens to have freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly. The First Amendment made litigations in these cases possible by giving the people the right to petition the government for rectifications of grievances.

Health Care Law

One of the state duties that are considered primary is maintaining the public health. This causes most health laws and regulations to be state-based. On the federal level, this body of law centers on the Department of Health and Human Services which is in charge of Medicaid and Medicare programs. However, health care law can also cover medical malpractice lawsuits, patient rights, and many other spheres.

Intellectual Property Law

Another branch of the law that has been growing steadily over past decades is intellectual property law. It deals with acquisition and enforcements of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. It is usually divided into 3 divisions.

– Patent law focuses on new inventions

– Trademark law is designed to defend distinguishing names, symbols or devices a company invested in

– Copyright law deals with protection of artistic, literary, and musical works.

Now, what you should keep in mind is that these are just the most common specializations and that each law school has the capability of offering different specializations that you could use to your own advantage. You could also specialize in sports law, tax law, water resources law, legal writing, land use law, entertainment law and many, many others. In fact, knowing what law you wish to specialize in is incredibly important when it comes to choosing the law school you want to attend.