Alice Paul was born on January 11, 1885, at Paulsdale in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey. She was the eldest of four children of William Mickle Paul I (1850-1902) and Tacie Paul (nee Parry), and a descendant of William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. Her siblings were Willam, Helen, and Parry. She grew up in the Quaker tradition of public service; her ancestors included participants in the New Jersey Committee of Correspondence in the Revolutionary era and a state legislative leader in the 19th century.

Paul attended Moorestown Friends School, where she graduated at the top of her class. In 1901, Paul went to Swarthmore College, an institution co-founded by her grandfather. While attending Swarthmore, Paul served as a member on the Executive Board of Student Government, one experience which may have sparked her eventual excitement for political activism. Alice graduated from Swarthmore College with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1905.  Partly in order to avoid going into teaching work, Paul completed a fellowship year at a settlement house in New York City after her graduation, living on the Lower East Side at the College Settlement House. While working on settlement activities taught her about the need to right injustice in America, Alice soon decided that social work was not the way she was to achieve this goal: "I knew in a very short time I was never going to be a social worker, because I could see that social workers were not doing much good in the world... you couldn't change the situation by social work."  Paul then earned a master of arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907, after completing coursework in political science, sociology and economics. She continued her studies at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England, and took economics classes from the University of Birmingham, while continuing to earn money doing social work. She first heard Christabel Pankhurst speak at Birmingham. When she later moved to London to work, she joined the militant suffrage group the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) led by Christabel and her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst. She was arrested repeatedly during suffrage demonstrations and served three jail terms. After returning from England in 1910, Paul continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Ph.D. in sociology. Her dissertation was entitled "The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania"; it discussed the history of the women's movement in Pennsylvania and the rest of the U.S., and urged woman suffrage as the key issue of the day.  Paul later received her law degree (LL.B) from the Washington College of Law at American University in 1922, after the suffrage fight was over. In 1927, she earned a master of laws degree, and in 1928, a doctorate in civil law from American University.

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: What was her favorite topic in school?
a doctorate in civil law from American University.