Andrew Gilbert

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I am a law student at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington D.C. I will be clerking at the U.S. Tax Court for the next two years and finishing my LL.M. in Taxation at night at Georgetown over the next few semesters.

The U.S. Tax Court is a federal trial court established under Article I of the U.S. Constitution to handle disputes between taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service. I’ll be doing legal research and helping to draft opinions following trial.

My St. Michael’s mathematics education was an excellent way to prepare for law school (and I’m sure it will continue to serve me well). Here are some of the ways it has helped me:

First, training in mathematics requires development of a superb attention to detail and an understanding of logical analysis, both of which are necessary in any legal career. Certain aspects of legal education encourage these skills, but I think you are far better off if you’ve been developing them for several years before you begin. You just don’t have much time to start learning about conditionals and argument structure while you are trying to vacuum up and organize vast amounts of information about personal jurisdiction or choice of law, for example.

Second, the St. Michael’s mathematics education helped me develop a variety of skills useful in the organization and presentation of data, including some rudimentary programming skills and a certain facility with LaTeX. It also allowed me to practice discussing complex topics with teachers and classmates (thanks to small class sizes and accessible faculty). I’ve found that this introduction has helped me figure out effective ways to present information in other contexts. For example, a little while ago I was working as a research assistant for a professor who wanted to self-publish a multi-layered index for a scholarly database she’d been developing. Microsoft Word couldn’t handle the complexity of the task, but with the help of a colleague who wrote some code to convert the database into TeX, we were able to produce exactly what my professor had been hoping for. The ability to find such solutions is a very valuable one for any lawyer because everything a lawyer does must eventually be presented and explained to someone else.

Finally, whether you decide to major in mathematics or take just a few courses, you will leave St. Mike’s having struggled through material as tough as anything you’ll see anywhere else. If you can hang in there with multi-variable calculus or the fundamental theorem of algebra, you can manage anything law school or anything else will throw at you, and it’s nice to know that.