How NSA Prepares Students for Law School

After graduating from New Saint Andrews College, students have a variety of vocations open to them. This is the power of NSA’s Liberal Arts degree. The undergraduate program equips students with preeminent skills that apply in multiple places. These skills include linguistic tools, logical reasoning, and persuasive arts which are all built on an understanding of Western history and the centrality of God’s word. One specific vocation that some NSA graduates have pursued is law school. 

I recently interviewed two NSA alumni who have pursued law studies, Nick Heid, who graduated in 2007, and Luke Zasadny, who graduated in May of this year.

Nick Heid and his wife Jericho have six kids and they live in Illinois. Nick opened his law practice in 2017. 

“You may be taking complex ideas about scripture, complex ideas about living, and trying to get it boiled down to a very, very specific idea.”

Nick talked with me about how important it is to study law. He said, “It is a major channel through which culture runs.” He added, “You can look at the Reformation: a lot of those guys had legal skills and legal backgrounds.” He explained, “Lawyers are people who have to interpret, articulate, and apply very, very complex ideas. And you have to be able to take something very, very complex and articulate it to a jury who doesn’t understand what any of that means.” Nick compared that process to what happens in shaping culture. He said, “You may be taking complex ideas about scripture, complex ideas about living, and trying to get it boiled down to a very, very specific idea.” The ability to simplify complex ideas enables the common man to understand them and to apply them to his life.  

I asked Nick why he chose to come to New Saint Andrews College. “I knew law was an area that I was really interested in pursuing,” Nick said. He had considered other schools but one key thing that attracted him to NSA was the Liberal Arts program. He and his dad had talked about the program and they appreciated the college’s focus on reading comprehension, writing arts, and speaking skills. Nick said that he and his dad concluded: “Here’s a school that is focusing on the classical model of dialectic and rhetoric that would be effective for me as a lawyer. And I found that to be very true.”

“The type of work you’re doing in law school,” Nick explained, “is taking a very large amount of information and trying to dial it down into its sine qua non: what is this court’s ruling? How can I get it down into a couple of lines?” He went on to say that this was the kind of work that he regularly did during his studies at NSA: “That is something that we would have to do when we would read Quintilian or read Thucydides. You have to be able to answer Schlect’s questions about what does this one thing mean?” 

After graduating from NSA, Nick studied law at Liberty University School of Law. He told me a story about a school dean surveying students on how their first semester was going at the law school. Nick said many of the other students complained that the reading was too much and too hard. Nick smiled about this remark and told me, "I was thinking to myself ‘this is so much easier than what I was used to at New Saint Andrews.’” Nick explained that NSA courses regularly required students to read a lot of hard texts so he felt well prepared for all the reading that he needed to do in case work at the law school. 

Luke Zasadny graduated this spring from NSA. He is currently attending Gonzaga School of Law in their summer-start program that began at the end of May. I asked Luke to write out some of his thoughts on this law program. 

I asked him about why he chose this path of study and Luke said that he saw this area of work as a pivotal place to shape the culture. He wrote, “At one level, I feel like God is calling me to this area specifically to utilize my passion for the written word and for addressing the degenerate vortex of chaos our society is falling into.” He added, “At a more personal level, law is, for me, the beautiful synthesis between abstract thought and concrete reality, strategy and execution, ideals and cold, dreary action.”

“I far prefer the background NSA gave me in channeling the nuclear forces of words and making them radiate, in helping me with the linguistic dexterity required to fervently engage students and professors in issues of worldview and exegesis.”

In reflecting on how NSA prepared him for this program, Luke wrote, “NSA was a power plant for the raw material of law: the written word.” Luke acknowledged that a few of his law school classmates had a prior background in law which allowed them to study it more extensively than he has. But Luke said, “I far prefer the background NSA gave me in channeling the nuclear forces of words and making them radiate, in helping me with the linguistic dexterity required to fervently engage students and professors in issues of worldview and exegesis.”

I asked him if there were specific NSA classes that helped prepare him for this program of study. Luke mentioned Dr. Mitch Stokes and his philosophy classes. Dr. Stokes would exhort students about real world issues and to be ready for those discussions. “Little did I know that, two weeks after graduating, I'd be thrown into the octagon with peers and professors over moral relativism, being, the problem of criterion, etc.” Luke wrote, “So Dr. Stokes' class felt providentially timely.”

New Saint Andrews College is not a law school but this course of study is foundational work for a student interested in pursuing law. The Liberal Arts program prepares students in this way because it opens students to the primary knowledge and skills needed to study and practice law. In this way, these graduates and others like them are shaping culture through this important vocation.