College Education Weekly

For more than thirty years, Woodbury College has been helping adults change their lives through practical education for professional and personal growth. Woodbury offers a challenging and supportive learning environment where faculty are keenly aware of the strengths and challenges that working adults bring to the learning process.

Woodbury College is a pioneer in educating the broader public in legal understanding and conflict management: Woodbury introduced paralegal education to the state of Vermont in 1975 and offers the nation's only M.S. in Mediation awarded by a regionally-accredited institution. The Woodbury faculty of experienced attorneys is committed to demystifying the law and helping non-attorneys know the legal dimensions essential to their activities, understand legal language and concepts, apply conflict management strategies as alternatives to legal process, manage their own legal affairs when they can, and use the services of attorneys productively.

Woodbury graduates play essential roles in government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector. One graduate is now a state Supreme Court Justice, another is director of a state Human Rights Commission, and a third is Administrative Judge for a state court system. Other alumni are mainstays of the research departments large law and insurance firms, advocates for children and families, coordinators of community justice programs, and mediators and attorneys and consultants in private practice.

Woodbury College is accredited by the New England Association of Schools & Colleges, Inc., through its Commission on Institutions of Higher Education.

The Master of Science in Law (MSL) degree at Woodbury College orients professionals - in manufacturing, sales, human resources, health, elder services, and other areas -- to the legal system and its many intersections with their profession.

The program's core courses equip professionals with knowledge in the areas of legal language and analysis, contracts, information privacy, litigation, constitutional issues, regulatory law, liability, and alternative dispute resolution. Concentration courses add specialized learning for managers, human resource specialists, health professionals, and those in the growing field of gerontology. Students learn to find and interpret the law affecting their activities, identify and handle situations with legal implications, and keep legal problems from escalating. All students study conflict management to learn skills for preventing and resolving disputes that need not go to litigation, and throughout the curriculum examine ethics through attention to the legal, moral and social implications of professional decisions.

In addition, the MSL has special value for foreign attorneys and foreign business executives preparing themselves to work effectively with the American legal system, and for paralegals who wish advanced training and an advanced degree.

This program does not prepare its graduates to practice law, but to use legal understanding in other professions, and in their lives as citizens. Its credits are not transferable to a J.D. program.

• Six start dates per year-Two per semester: spring, summer and fall
• Ten three-credit courses for a total of thirty credits
• The program can be completed in less than two years
• Small group of students who move through the program with you
• Online, asynchronous curricular activities include discussions, papers, projects, reports, case studies and workplace-oriented assignments