Woodbury College

About Woodbury College

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.

The MSL program is structured as follows:

• 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

Master of Science in Law
Online Program Areas of Concentration

In addition to the core courses, you may select one of four concentration areas: Managerial Law, Human Resource Law, Elder Law or Health Law. Each concentration area provides in depth knowledge of law as pertaining to a specific industry or area of expertise.

• Managerial Law
  The Managerial Law concentration orients professionals to the basic forms of business organizations, the role of administrative law in regulated areas, and the fundamental areas of employment law. The Managerial Law concentration places business professionals in a position to effectively understand and work with the law and lawyers when planning and solving professional problems.

  

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• Human Resource Law
  The Human Resource Law concentration provides students with a general overview of law affecting the non-unionized workplace. These legal issues include Federal legislation and administrative regulations; the hiring, firing, promoting, disciplining or evaluating of employees; and the various laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace.

  

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• Elder Law
  The Elder Law concentration examines the rights senior citizens have including freedom from abuse, neglect and exploitation and the related regulatory schemes to protect these rights. Also examined are the programs established by federal and state governments to assist senior citizens, beginning with Social Security and Supplemental Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. Additionally, students will look at the various financial tools available to an individual planning for retirement and late life concerns, and the legal and regulatory dimensions of those tools.

  

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• Health Law
  The Health Law concentration explores the current legal issues of patients' rights to control their own treatment, and the ways in which state and federal law regulate healthcare providers. Students also consider important contemporary problems and advances in healthcare policy as they affect healthcare advocates and providers, along with hospitals and residential care facilities.

  

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