Legal careers: Politics
A substantial portion of individuals in elected office have law degrees – for example, roughly one-third of members of Congress went to law school. As well, many high-ranking elected and appointed officials within the executive branch (at both the state and federal level) are lawyers, and, of course, nearly 100% of the judiciary have law degrees (interestingly, a number of states do not require the judges in some local courts to be lawyers).
While a legal education may be especially helpful to those charged with making or enforcing the law, it is by no means necessary. It is also important to understand that most of those elected or appointed officials who went to law school practiced law for some period of time before entering politics.
