I’ve been wondering if I can finish my law degree? It’s been over 10 years. Will I have to start over? Does anyone know? I know I will have to take the lsat again, but I’m concerned about the cost. I have taken my first year courses. I had to stop b/c I had a very traumatic event in my life and then got married and had children. Now, I’m wondering if I can finish without re-taking the courses that I have completed? I left the school in good-standing.
some law and med schools put a cap on your projected age upon graduation. in my university, med school grads can’t be older than 30. law is a bit more fuzzy. a friend of mine’s a doctor but he took law as a second course. finished at 48.
Seems like the place to go for an authoritative answer is … your law school. Why not call them up and ask?
Is this a non-US med school? Because that sounds very odd to me.
I’ve never heard of this kind of policy at any American law school. It’s pretty routine to see people who have retired from another career to take up a law degree.
Yeah, I took the LSAT on my 30th birthday and no giant warning klaxons went off. I managed to graduate undetected. 
The oldest student at my law school was in their 60s.
Actually I would guess that such a rule would roundly violate age discrimination laws.
As to whether you would have to re-take 1L classes, etc, you really need to speak with your law school, or any law school you are thinking of attending, and discuss it with them.
Obviously it’s going to depend on the school in question. I believe tech credits at my old college were only good for 10 years, at which point you’d have to retake the classes, but I don’t think law has quite as much volatility as technology. They might just make you take a qualifying exam to test whether you’ve retained the knowledge from the first time around.
Definitely, check with the school - or any other school to which you’d like to transfer credits. It can be complicated, but there’s no harm in asking.
Be warned: If you’re anything like me, your study skills have deteriorated sharply since you were last in law school. I took just two years off between college graduation and starting law school, and my first term’s grades sucked. It was very hard to get back into the academic mindset.
All the universities I went to and worked for had time limits on course requirements. 7 years is the standard. If your degree requires you to have taken Physics 101 to graduate and it’s been more than 7 years, you have to retake the course.
OTOH, credit hours are frequently preserved so you still keep those.
This was a real concern for some PhD students I’ve known. While individual courses weren’t required, nearing 7 years after passing their qualifying exams became a concern for a few.
I have never, ever heard anything remotely like an upper limit on age for students of any type anywhere in the US. Lower age limits (to ward off 12 year old wunderkinds who aren’t socially mature enough to handle college) have become more common in recent years.
Note, in all my decades in academia, I learned one important thing: everything can be appealed. Take this guy for example. Presumably all his credits timed out 70 years ago but I assume the college did a bunch of exceptions so he could finish.
The only way to find out is to contact the law school.
I had the opposite experience. I took 10 years off and arrived raring to go, with the additional bonus of self-insight about my optimal work habits and seriously not caring about other people’s bullshit. My first semester grades were excellent. If I had started straight after college or even soon after college I would have been a burned out mess.
Not to discount EH’s point of view. Just saying: YMMV.
Are law school cumulative in knowledge? Will a student build directly on what they learned in year 1 in year 2? Math classes are cumulative. Most schools use the same text book for Calculus I, II, III. It’s one long course spread over three semesters. IIRC Cal IV used a different book.
If so then a 10 year layoff would be a huge problem. I don’t know how the classes are structured.
Very generally speaking, students have to take the basic courses – contracts, property, torts, civil procedure, constitutional law, legal research and writing, ethics, criminal law, evidence – which overlap very little and which will change very little over a course of 10 years in content or concept. You might have missed one or two landmark cases, but that won’t affect your ability to complete law school successfully.
After that, it’s all electives, which are not necessarily cumulative with respect to each other. (Obviously, to take Constitutional Law II, you must have already taken Constitutional Law I, but you aren’t required to take Constitutional Law II if you don’t want to.)
If your university is in the US, having a firm “requirement” of med school students being under 30 would likely be a violation of age-discrimination laws. Federal funding could be withheld, and nearly all med schools receive some federal funding. Some schools prefer that their students be younger, so they will have time to practice and effectively amortize both the education and the debt. This is hardly impossible to overcome, however. For example, my wife’s study partner in med school was 41 when she entered, and that was hardly the only second-career med student I met in her class.
And another thing …
When you matriculate (never got used to that word), the graduation requirements for your degree are spelled out in that year’s college bulletin (or course catalog or … whatever your place calls it). (Which used to be very useful hard copy booklets but of course nowadays …)
That would (usually) be the requirements you had to meet to graduate 4 years later. You are often given the option (and in case of program changes, forced) to use a newer bulletin. Schools will also time out bulletins. Again, 7 years is typical.
So it may be the case that the original set of degree requirements have changed and you would need to “upgrade” to the new ones, assuming they have changed.
Maybe not too much of a problem in Law, but in my field (Computer Science), 10 years ago is ancient history and programs tend to change quite a bit.
Agreed. But the OPs question is whether one can resume law school after an extended break, not start law school at an advanced (?) age.
Generally, there is no “expiration date” for college credits, but the degree requirements are likely to have changed. I took some comp sci classes as an undergrad that are no longer taught, for example.
that’s right, it’s not in the US (and i was talking about med schools.) but i’ve a strong feeling unwritten laws in some US colleges still hold. i know of one ivy league school that still follows a “secret quota.” sorry, i can’t disclose.
Did you see what I was responding to?
You need to talk to your school. Even if there is normally a time limit to complete your degree, they may be able to make exceptions for extenuating circumstances, but it may take some legwork and a sympathetic dean. I did this when I had a serious injury with protracted rehab after completing all my M.A. classes, but before defending my thesis…followed by my committee chair dying. The Dean cut me some slack, and I eventually defended my thesis and got my diploma.
When I was at law school, we had an example of this. Many years before, the mother of one of my classmates had finished first year law but then got married and started having babies, so she dropped out of law school - that’s what moms did in the early 60’s.
But having her daughter go to law school, the same law school she had been at, made her start thinking “what if”.
When we were in third year, her mom was back in second year! As far as I know, she graduated the year after her daughter.
So, kareob, as others have said, talk to your law school. And be persistent and persuasive - it’ll be good training for when you’re called to the bar! 
Good luck!
Do check with your law school, but I suspect the answer is going to be no. ABA accreditation standard 304(c) [pdf link] provides: