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Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Exlawdean wrote:Anonymous wrote:Do you really think a LSAT score tells you anything about a prospective lawyer?
First, as I emphasized above, these are my opinions. The LSAT score is, in part, an indicator of cleverness. The questions are difficult, and the ability to answer them is indicative of the ability of the prospective student to solve hard questions. LSAT score correlates well with GRE scores, with SAT scores, and, perhaps more importantly, with the ability to pass the bar exam in states with very hard bar examinations (e.g. California and New York). To be clear, I should point out that the correlation data is not just my opinion, but is a set of statistical relationships.
Second, there is no doubt that there is also a cultural component to the LSAT. There is also a cultural component to legal practice. Does this disadvantage those without the "right" cultural background? In my opinion, yes.
"right cultural background"
What?!?
Maybe he is referring to how one's culture typically resolves disputes ?
In my experience - at very top of the class at a T10 law school and the law review editor 35 years ago - believe it or not a reluctant law student of sorts - culture clearly matters. Those at the bottom of the class - yes - often admitted with significant admissions boosts - were not in any experiential sense unintelligent - they just didn't grasp that the law by and large was a system of rules centered around who gets the money - and that rules of law have been developed around that principle. I didn't think negatively about it - in lesser developed countries many can't keep what they earn or build a small business because there are no enforceable rules to protect what is earned. Even my most progressive law review colleagues understood this, so it is not a statement about one's politics. I recall taking a third year bankruptcy class, and the professor, to his credit, trying to get everyone involved. The group of students who didn't do all that well sat together, and they predictably answered in terms of what is fair as opposed to applying legal rules to facts - as if it was a college sociology class. It broke my heart - the oft repeated blather about the best interest of the creditors in the class was a legal rule to kick start analysis, not end it. I competed in a most minority sport in college on scholarship, so my views were perhaps different than the average well heeled law student. I wondered what the schools were doing, inviting these students in while behind in preparation (again, cultural deficiencies too), encouraging them to take on unfathomable debt. only to face less than optimum first time bar pass rates and career challenges. It was made worse by the fact that by and large these students were far more interesting than the average Ivy League or Ivy equivalent grinder at the school.
This is a hard story to hear so soon after my above the median kid with demonstrated interest was dismissed as too young. But he needs to use a tuition benefit that runs out and can’t postpone.
Huh? If your kid is a well qualified (in terms of LSAT and GPA) recent college graduate and wants to go to law school he can get in a good one without a problem. Don’t blame it on his age or background.
He said people who come straight from undergrad are assumed to be less mature and top schools favor older candidates who’ve worked for awhile. “A good one” yes, but hearing that a top 10 (a common goal) will take students who struggle with the difference between philosophy and law over an above the median person out of undergrad is disappointing, yes.
Why is it disappointing? K-JDs have no life experience.
+1. It isn't just law schools that have a preference for some post-college work experience; employers do, too. K-JD tend to have less of a clue on the practical realities of how their clients' businesses operate. A little post-college experience goes a long way.
-- NU grad from the mid-90s. About half our class had work experience.
Both of you glossed over that he said - and I was referring to - that top schools do take people who have shown lower readiness. I’m not comparing a 21 year old and a 30 year old with otherwise equal applications. I’m comparing a 21 year old with all markers of higher bar pass rate potential than a 30 with lower markers for a bar pass rate potential. And while I would expect this at a lot of schools, I would not expect it at a top 10 school.
Interesting that there is so much discussion regarding "bar passage potential". While state bars vary in difficulty, few law students who attend the top 100 law schools have difficulty passing state bar exams. "Bar passage potential" is a low standard among the the top 100 law schools. Anyone achieving above a 151 or 152 LSAT score should be able to pass their state bar exam with a bit of preparation.
The relation between LSAT and passing the bar is probabilistic, and depends on not only LSAT but which state bar the graduate is taking. Some states have very difficult bar exams (think about California and New York). For such states higher LSAT scores are required to produce the same probability of passage as a lower LSAT has in an easier state (e.g. Pennsylvania).
Professors think about grading all the time. We worry about it. Here's what we know. 1. Students' grades correlate highly between courses. If a student gets an A in one course, the probability is high that the student will get an A in a second course. Thus, whatever it is that we are reacting to when we read exam answers, we (professors) tend to react in the same way. 2. Some of us use multiple choice question, similar to those on the bar examination. Students' scores on multiple choice questions correlate highly with their scores on answers to essay questions. 3. There has been grade inflation over the past 40 years. 4. Grading answers to essay questions is the most boring part of a law professor's job. That is unanimous. The most difficult task is paying attention when reading the 40th answer in a row to the same essay prompt. I don't condone drinking while grading, but I understand it. 5. We are profoundly uncertain about making small distinctions -- e.g. A or A-? -- but quite confident about making large ones -- e.g. A or B-?.Anonymous wrote:I have a couple of questions:
1. Unauthorized practice of law (UPL) - My understanding is that there is no clear line where practicing law begins and ends outside of litigating in court and providing a legal opinion. It seems that traditional legal services are under assault by legal tech, the big 4/consultants, and general cost cutting. For example, shifting previous attorney roles to lesser paid compliance roles; having compliance consultants copy in-house counsel to obtain attorney-client privilege on certain matters; or tax accountants editing formation/merger documents. Do you see this trend continuing and how do you think it will affect the already saturated legal market? Should law schools do something either by changing what is taught or better defining the practice of law to protect the value of the JD? Law schools can only do a few things to help protect the value of a JD. Technological and economic changes will produce, in my opinion, a reduction in the demand for lawyers. One strategy is to emphasize teaching about practice areas that will (and I am guessing here) be more resistant to the incursion of AI. I started a class in Entertainment Law and Business for exactly that reason. The social and technological changes that buffet the entertainment industry would, I thought, make it less rewarding to "train" an AI machine on historical records. Similarly, the few law professors I know who think about such things have concluded that regulatory law (which for these purposes is an amalgam of courses on Administrative Law plus the subject matter courses on regulation, such as Environmental Law, Telecommunications Regulation, Securities Regulation, etc.) may fit the bill. Technological plus political changes often render the historical record to be of little use, except as prologue. We can also train our students how to use AI, likely part of the research and writing courses that one finds at every law school. I believe that most schools are anticipating doing so.
2. Legal education - It seems legal education has stagnated for sometime. What needs to be updates to contend with the current job market and prepare students for the future impacts of things like AI? Do you think schools can evolve to tackle these issues? Or will schools fail to evolve like after the introduction of ediscovery (where the big 4 ended up setting up ediscovery groups and the lawyers ended up in doc review)? Some of this I answered in the paragraph, above. I can't really predict. Some firms, such as O'M&M, have set up ediscovery shops inside their firms. The firms that evolve best will do better.
3. Cost - It seems to me that making law school a graduate program has allowed schools to exponentially up the cost due to the way loans are distributed (no caps for grad school loans, while undergraduate loans have caps). Did the institutions you worked at ever siphone money paid by the law students to subsidize other programs or initiatives that would not have a direct or indirect benefit on the law students? Yes. One of the schools took a substantial amount of money from both the Law School and the Business School and sent the money to the Medical School. And one of the universities explicitly took money from all academic units to fill in holes in the Athletic Department budget. It was beyond annoying. Given that law school admissions generally requires no pre-requisite classwork or specific work experience, it seems there would be a benefit to moving it back to a undergraduate degree to lower costs via the cap on student loans and by not requiring students to pay for a bachelors first. This is a topic with a long history. The most common suggestion is just lopping off the last year of law school. This would save 1/3 the cost. Judge Richard Posner was an advocate of this approach. Some suggest that we should adopt something more like the German system, where law is an undergraduate degree. Note that they also require a couple of years of post graduate internships. China, on the other hand, as well as Japan, have both moved in the opposite direction, setting up post graduate law schools. Where do you stand on maintaining the JD graduate scheme? If for the status quo, what are the benefits of keeping the JD a graduate degree? The main value, IMO, is that when we graduate our students and send them into the world they are older and more experienced. I think the real issue that you are having is that law school is so darned expensive, leading to huge debt loads. This is truly a recent phenomenon, and has been driven by (at least) two factors. First, the introduction of federally insured student loans several decades ago greatly increased demand for law school. As economics 101 tells us, when demand for something goes up, the price of that thing tends to rise. Second, the USN&WR rankings of law schools has included factors that prompted law schools to increase the costs of providing a legal education. Most directly, expenditures per student did that. Faculty/student ratio did that. At many schools the faculty/student ratio has almost doubled in the past 50 years. In addition, almost every law school has added enormous numbers of staff people in the past 50 years. They are in not just admissions and placement, but also in communications, student services (including therapists in some schools), facilities and maintenance, event staffing, etc. All of this costs money (which helps raise expenditures/student) and provides a more appealing experience. But it also drives up tuition, and the need for loans. These factors have turned law school into an extremely expensive endeavor. The easiest way to handle that would be to operate leaner, much as we did in the early 1970s. I must admit -- I would not like to try to implement the "rollback" this would require.
4. Curves/grading - How accurate do you think schools are at ranking students along the curve? After discussions with how some of my professors graded work, I was already concerned that there was some margin of error in ranking, but my law school experience led me to believe that it was higher than I imagined (eg, while drinking scotch on a plane). Some schools also have moved to the honors/pass/fail grading system. Do you think that system better captures students ability/potential?
I apologize for having missed some of the posts along the way. I have been dealing with a bathroom redo and it has been consuming my time (and our money). I will attempt to insert italicized responses where I think I have a reasonable answer.
Anonymous wrote:Exlawdean wrote:In the aftermath of the Students for Fair Admissions decision, I thought it might help if I made some comments that put it into context.
First, although the opinion is literally about undergraduate admissions (at Harvard and at UNC) I don't know anyone who thinks this decision does not apply to law school admissions programs.
Second, this decision has been anticipated, at a general level, by most law school admissions offices, ever since the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.
Third, at the very end of his opinion, Justice Roberts laid out what the majority wants. Race can be taken into account at an individual level, if it directly connects to character traits and abilities in the individual that the school values. It is worth quoting this short section:
"nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. . . . A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."
Fourth, the majority claimed to be irked by the inability to measure the benefits from diversity, the central rationale for the predominant system that the majority struck down. No one that I have talked to will hazard a guess whether the new, retail approach to considering race that Roberts' opinion describes in the quoted language above, will need to produce measurable benefits in order to survive.
Fifth, I have heard suggestions that admissions offices can just move to using wholesale proxies for race -- think of preferring people from certain zip codes -- and avoid the thrust of the majority opinion. I think that is wrong. Such a wholesale approach will likely fall quickly if challenged in court. The quoted language, and other language from section VI of the majority opinion, rejects such an attempted work-around, IMO.
Sixth, re-configuring the admissions process to conform to Roberts' opinion can be done, but it will be expensive. Producing the tailoring that Roberts demands will likely mean hiring additional admissions officers. There are other possible responses, but I won't go into them here.
That's all, for now. Have a great 4th.
Thank you for starting and participating in this thread.
I do not understand your sixth point in light of your third point. Why would any admissions process need to be reconfigured ? Why would additional AOs need to be hired to conform to Chief Justice Roberts opinion ? In my view, this is a very simple and inexpensive transition--eliminate race boxes from the admissions application and read the applicants' personal statement essays.
Very good question. I believe that the major application advisors (think Spivey) will change the way that they are advising applicants to craft their applications. From this point forward the applications will be crafted to show that the applicant has had to overcome challenges in some way that demonstrates an ability or character trait that will be (should be?) of value to the school. This will not be the advice only to diverse candidates. White candidates -- particularly those with less than stellar LSAT and UGPA -- will be urged to write this as well. And, maybe some others, as well. Each one of those statements must be read with care. And, anticipating litigation and discovery (because the majority made it easy for plaintiffs to get standing in such cases), the admissions officer must write an evaluation of the candidate on the same dimensions. The evaluation must be at least several sentences, explaining the degree to which they find the candidate's experiences, and the connection to valuable skills and character traits, believable and appealing. I would not merely rely on a check box. Further, I would not want a canned paragraph. We would need to be showing [i]individualized attention to comply. I think this will be on top of the other work that the admissions officers have to do. Until the volume of applications starts to shrink (see my previous post on demographics) we will need an extra admissions officer or two to do the work.[/i]
In the aftermath of the Students for Fair Admissions decision, I thought it might help if I made some comments that put it into context.
First, although the opinion is literally about undergraduate admissions (at Harvard and at UNC) I don't know anyone who thinks this decision does not apply to law school admissions programs.
Second, this decision has been anticipated, at a general level, by most law school admissions offices, ever since the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.
Third, at the very end of his opinion, Justice Roberts laid out what the majority wants. Race can be taken into account at an individual level, if it directly connects to character traits and abilities in the individual that the school values. It is worth quoting this short section:
"nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. . . . A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."
Fourth, the majority claimed to be irked by the inability to measure the benefits from diversity, the central rationale for the predominant system that the majority struck down. No one that I have talked to will hazard a guess whether the new, retail approach to considering race that Roberts' opinion describes in the quoted language above, will need to produce measurable benefits in order to survive.
Fifth, I have heard suggestions that admissions offices can just move to using wholesale proxies for race -- think of preferring people from certain zip codes -- and avoid the thrust of the majority opinion. I think that is wrong. Such a wholesale approach will likely fall quickly if challenged in court. The quoted language, and other language from section VI of the majority opinion, rejects such an attempted work-around, IMO.
Sixth, re-configuring the admissions process to conform to Roberts' opinion can be done, but it will be expensive. Producing the tailoring that Roberts demands will likely mean hiring additional admissions officers. There are other possible responses, but I won't go into them here.
That's all, for now. Have a great 4th.
First, although the opinion is literally about undergraduate admissions (at Harvard and at UNC) I don't know anyone who thinks this decision does not apply to law school admissions programs.
Second, this decision has been anticipated, at a general level, by most law school admissions offices, ever since the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.
Third, at the very end of his opinion, Justice Roberts laid out what the majority wants. Race can be taken into account at an individual level, if it directly connects to character traits and abilities in the individual that the school values. It is worth quoting this short section:
"nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. . . . A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race."
Fourth, the majority claimed to be irked by the inability to measure the benefits from diversity, the central rationale for the predominant system that the majority struck down. No one that I have talked to will hazard a guess whether the new, retail approach to considering race that Roberts' opinion describes in the quoted language above, will need to produce measurable benefits in order to survive.
Fifth, I have heard suggestions that admissions offices can just move to using wholesale proxies for race -- think of preferring people from certain zip codes -- and avoid the thrust of the majority opinion. I think that is wrong. Such a wholesale approach will likely fall quickly if challenged in court. The quoted language, and other language from section VI of the majority opinion, rejects such an attempted work-around, IMO.
Sixth, re-configuring the admissions process to conform to Roberts' opinion can be done, but it will be expensive. Producing the tailoring that Roberts demands will likely mean hiring additional admissions officers. There are other possible responses, but I won't go into them here.
That's all, for now. Have a great 4th.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:[I would be interested to know if any of you have developed effective techniques (short of spending a year teaching in a law school) to understand and measure the differences between various law schools. If so, please share.
I would also be really interested in hearing this. Is it necessary/useful to visit law schools before you apply?
No, it's not. OP Dean is writing a book and s crowdsourcing here
OP Dean mocked the dog and pony show of admitted students day so I’m interested too. How do you really know what they’re like?
I certainly did not intend to mock the admitted students events. I was, however, attempting to claim that they were not informative.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:[I would be interested to know if any of you have developed effective techniques (short of spending a year teaching in a law school) to understand and measure the differences between various law schools. If so, please share.
I would also be really interested in hearing this. Is it necessary/useful to visit law schools before you apply?
No, it's not. OP Dean is writing a book and s crowdsourcing here
I am not writing a book on law school, or getting into law school, or which law schools best prepare students for particular jobs, or anything related to these threads.
Having taught at a reasonable collection of law schools (Northwestern, Univ of Texas Austin, USC, NYU, Chicago, Stanford) I can attest to their being substantial differences between law schools. Most of these differences are not captured in any ranking. Instead, the schools differ in terms of how demanding they are, how tolerant they are of non-mainstream political views, the emphasis they put on getting public interest jobs rather than big law jobs, and in many other ways. I have seen the shows that most (all?) of these law schools put on for admitted students, and it would be, in my opinion, very difficult to figure out what is really going on in the school just by attending the admitted students events. Still, other things being equal, it would be good to to figure out the differences between the schools. Your child's satisfaction with their legal education will depend partly on some of the differences.
I would be interested to know if any of you have developed effective techniques (short of spending a year teaching in a law school) to understand and measure the differences between various law schools. If so, please share.
I would be interested to know if any of you have developed effective techniques (short of spending a year teaching in a law school) to understand and measure the differences between various law schools. If so, please share.
Anonymous wrote:It is not necessary to attend and graduate from a Top 14 law school in order to be a successful attorney. The two most important questions regarding which law school to attend is COA/affordability and geographic preference for one's career.
For those who want to live & work in a major US city after law school, then graduating from a Top 14 law school is important for both serious consideration by the nation's most elite law firms and for geographic mobility among major US cities.
For those who are not targeting biglaw law firms or practicing in a major US city in a large law firm, then local or state public flagship law schools are fine due to location and to affordability/low cost of attendance.
Attending a Top 14 law school often requires the student to assume a significant amount of student loan debt which almost necessitates employment in biglaw for several years in order to pay off the substantial student loan debt.
I want to emphasize some of the points in this post, almost all of which are right. Schools outside of the T14 can often place well into top law firms that are in their geographic area. Thus, both UCLA and USC place well into top law firms in Los Angeles and Orange counties. But neither of them places all that well into areas far from Los Angeles. On the other hand, if someone attends Columbia or NYU, they will place very well into top New York firms, and will also place well into Los Angeles area firms. The higher up in the rankings one goes, the greater the ease of geographic mobility. These issues also implicate one's ability to get top public interest jobs. If one looks, for example, at the lawyers for the Natural Resources Defense Council, you will find that they are populated mainly by Yale and Harvard grads, with a smattering of other T8 graduates.
I also agree that an applicant must make a tradeoff between cost of attending school and the professional opportunities and flexibility later on. These are personal decisions, and it is difficult comment beyond that.
Anonymous wrote:I’m a retired lawyer following up on the Harvard poster’s criticism of the OP. I’m not a Harvard guy.
I agree with the criticism. I think the OP is out of touch and that much of what he says is demonstrably wrong. I don’t think, for example, that Harvard is now going to start awarding merit scholarships to maintain or move up in the rankings, and neither will the other schools who have boycotted the publication. One of their core stated reasons for the boycott was that it led too many good law schools to award merit aid at the expense of need based aid and that was bad for the system. The boycotting schools aren’t about to reverse course now.
I don't know, with certainty, that any one of the selective law schools that have not given merit aid in the past will start doing so. But I do know that majority of applicants to law school utilize USNWR. Maybe that will change. But without truly massive changes in applicant behavior re USNWR, there will be pressure on schools with falling USNWR rankings to do something. If such schools fail to do something, and students continue to use USNWR rankings to select their law schools, then such schools risk having reality conform to the rankings. The quality of their students will trend towards their new, lower ranking. And, year by year, hiring executives at large firms will start to take this into account. I suspect that some (perhaps not most) selective schools in such a situation will decide to start offering merit scholarships. This is, of course, all theory. In the next five years we can see how this all plays out. Stay tuned.
Interestingly, OP uses Chicago as an example of an elite school that “clearly” gives merit aid, while failing to mention that it’s also the one elite school that didn’t boycott the rankings. So it’s the exception that proves the rule actually. I think you only have part of the story. Approximately years ago U Chicago Law's ranking had fallen to 6, consistently. The quality of students was trending in that direction. The then-dean of law and the President got together and decided to start aggressively using merit scholarships to attract better students and move up in the rankings. It worked. So Chicago is an example of exactly the phenomenon I was describing.
The one thing I will disagree with the Harvard guy about is his claim that Harvard has always been the number one most in demand law school. US news ranking or otherwise, the “number one” distinction belongs to Yale and has for a long time. It is without question, the nation’s most selective law, school and when given the choice between Yale and Harvard, the majority of students accepted to both pick Yale. That is a fact, not conjecture.
Anonymous wrote:My child did quite well throughout college and completed an undergraduate degree in political science six years ago.
After working in various jobs that were (mostly) policy related, said child decided to apply to law school, was accepted to a DC area program, and began their first semester last fall.
However, there were some bumps in the road during that first semester…aside from getting acclimated to the “newness” of law school, there was a 7 day absence due to an illness that required hospitalization; difficulty getting help with legal writing assignments from the school; and the unavailability of required medication that was needed for concentration. As a result, the fall semester grades weren’t great and an academic dismissal was issued.
This came as a complete surprise to my child (and to us as well), but I investigated and found out the story we got was indeed accurate. Our child appealed the decision, but the appeal was denied.
Are first semester dismissals typical in law school? I would have thought that academic probation would have been the first step, especially given the handful of challenges that were experienced during the semester.
My husband and I are very upset by this, but our child is devastated. We think it was an extreme measure, but we’re not really sure of how to advise our child to address it, assuming it even should be addressed. The dismissal letter that was provided had a line that read, “we encourage you to reapply for admission.,” but I’m not sure if that was a genuine statement. It seemed strange to dismiss a student from school and encourage them to return all in the same letter.
We think this child is capable of successfully managing and completing law school (our other child is not), and they would like to continue working toward a law degree. Would you be able to offer any suggestions on possible next steps? Would switching to another school be feasible? How do most law students proceed in cases like this?
Thank you for any insight you can offer.
On the facts that you have given, the school's action seems unusual and more than a bit harsh. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the grades were extremely low. In such a circumstance, when I was dean I likely would have offered up a "reset," a chance to start the first year, again, on a clean slate. Perhaps that is what the quoted language means. If so, the most obvious strategy is to reapply for admission, try to stay healthy, and perform better on the tests next year. I wish you and yours the best.
Anonymous wrote:This string makes me think there needs to be a separate law school category!
I agree.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:As a parent, my 1st question is how hard or is it possible to get scholarships/FA from a top 14 law school? DC is attending college in the fall at a top SLAC and is aspiring to study environmental science, law and public policies. Any advice will be appreciated!
Not OP, but I got one at Georgetown. My sense of what were the contributing factors: (1) high LSAT (174); (2) hard-core major (math); (3) good undergrad grades; and (4) documented interest in a particular specialty (law & econ/antitrust).
Other people had better LSAT scores and better grades than I did, so it was not just about those two numbers.
Georgetown law school is well known for awarding lots of merit scholarships to both incoming first year law students as well as to transfer law students.
The top 3 law schools (Yale, Stanford, & Harvard) do not award merit scholarships, but these law schools do award need based financial aid.
I thought I would add some context to the discussion of scholarship availability. First, I had intended this thread to be about much more than the T14. Most lawyers do not go to T14 schools. So, from time to time, I will try to widen, a bit, the discussion.
Second, the practice of awarding scholarships varies dramatically from school to school. As one of the commenters, above, noted, Yale, Stanford, & Harvard claim not to award merit scholarships, and have stuck to this claim for years. On the other hand, the University of Chicago -- a very fine school which has occupied the #3 spot on US News for the past couple of years -- clearly gives merit scholarships. And many of the other 25 law schools that claim to be in the top 20 also give merit scholarships. There is no hard and fast rule. Instead, you have to go school by school in whatever year you are accepted and find out what a particular school's policies are at that time. This goes further than just need v. merit. Many schools have scholarship endowments from alumni who want to give to law students who are "like" the donor. Thus, there are law schools with endowments for scholarship funds for veterans of the armed forces, for immigrants, for the first to go to law school in their family, and so forth. NYU has scholarships for those who plan to practice public interest law. Some law school may even have a scholarship fund for those who were mathematics majors. I don't know which school that might be, but I can't rule it out. You must work with an admissions and financial aid officer at each school to find out if that school has narrowly drawn scholarship assistance that might work with your situation.
Third, the regularity that we have observed for the past decade or two -- some schools say no merit scholarships -- may turn out to be quite contingent. Why do I say this? There are two phenomena that may destabilize our equilibrium. (1) The reformation of US News rankings in response to continued attacks by law school deans and others has shaken up the methodology and the rankings. The schools that have fallen may well feel pressure to do something about the situation. Consider Harvard Law, ranked number 5 this year. Do you believe that the Harvard Board of Trustees, the alumni of Harvard Law, or the Dean of Law at Harvard will be satisfied with that ranking? I don't. I believe that pressure will build to "do something." And part of "doing something" may well include putting some money on the table for merit scholarships. (2) We are approaching a small demographic cliff. As all academic administrators know, people stopped making babies after the advent of the great recession at the same pace that we did before the great recession. Most of the articles that I have read indicate that undergraduate admissions should expect approximately a 20% reduction in applications in 2028, give or take. And this reduction will persist for a while. By 2032 or 2033, this reduction will hit law school admissions. The effects of this very large reduction in the applicant pool will pressure admissions offices, even those at T14 law schools, to work much harder to enroll the classes they want and to keep their rankings. The obvious outcome will be that if you have a child in the seventh grade at this time who decides that they want to go to law school, they likely will be able to get into a higher ranked law school ten years from now than they can with the same LSAT and UGPA, etc., right now. And, as a corollary, that same child may find it possible to get some merit scholarship ten years from now at a law school that claims never to give merit scholarships today.
I hope this helps.
Anonymous wrote:What undergraduate majors fare best - not necessarily in admissions, but in actual coursework?
The American Association of Law Schools has studied this question in some depth. Feel free to dive in. The answers are a bit surprising. Accounting performs quite well. So does physics.
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:I have a couple of questions:
1. Unauthorized practice of law (UPL) - My understanding is that there is no clear line where practicing law begins and ends outside of litigating in court and providing a legal opinion. It seems that traditional legal services are under assault by legal tech, the big 4/consultants, and general cost cutting. For example, shifting previous attorney roles to lesser paid compliance roles; having compliance consultants copy in-house counsel to obtain attorney-client privilege on certain matters; or tax accountants editing formation/merger documents. Do you see this trend continuing and how do you think it will affect the already saturated legal market? Should law schools do something either by changing what is taught or better defining the practice of law to protect the value of the JD?
2. Legal education - It seems legal education has stagnated for sometime. What needs to be updates to contend with the current job market and prepare students for the future impacts of things like AI? Do you think schools can evolve to tackle these issues? Or will schools fail to evolve like after the introduction of ediscovery (where the big 4 ended up setting up ediscovery groups and the lawyers ended up in doc review)?
3. Cost - It seems to me that making law school a graduate program has allowed schools to exponentially up the cost due to the way loans are distributed (no caps for grad school loans, while undergraduate loans have caps). Did the institutions you worked at ever siphone money paid by the law students to subsidize other programs or initiatives that would not have a direct or indirect benefit on the law students? Given that law school admissions generally requires no pre-requisite classwork or specific work experience, it seems there would be a benefit to moving it back to a undergraduate degree to lower costs via the cap on student loans and by not requiring students to pay for a bachelors first. Where do you stand on maintaining the JD graduate scheme? If for the status quo, what are the benefits of keeping the JD a graduate degree?
4. Curves/grading - How accurate do you think schools are at ranking students along the curve? After discussions with how some of my professors graded work, I was already concerned that there was some margin of error in ranking, but my law school experience led me to believe that it was higher than I imagined (eg, while drinking scotch on a plane). Some schools also have moved to the honors/pass/fail grading system. Do you think that system better captures students ability/potential?
(Not OP)
UPL is more complex than one might think.
As you know, the US economy is heavily affected by, and intertwined with, laws. We are a nation of laws. It would be much easier to change the definition of UPL than to enforce the unenforeable--which is the current system. The only US jurisdiction with reasonable UPL provisions is Wash DC where UPL restrictions were made to accommodate lobbyists.
Re: Legal Education. My opinion is that it is outdated. Law school should be reduced to 2 years, instead of 3, and a required third year should consist of supervised practical legal work experience.
Re: Cost of a law degree/legal education. For decades, law schools have been viewed as, and used as, cash cows for universities. The cost of adding additional law students is low and the return to the law school & university is high. The only constraint is employment results.
I have already responded to the original post, so I will confine myself to commenting on the comment. Re Legal Education: There is a many decades-old debate over 2 v. 3 years for legal education. When returning GIs wanted to go to law school after WWII, many law schools (including Harvard) went to a two-year, year round system that churned out veterans with law degrees. After a few years they went back to the current system. Re Cost: The funding of law schools and the degree to which they "give" money to central administration varies dramatically from school to school. I did a study (never published!) of the net tax rate [(money from law school to central minus money from central to law school)/all tuition and fee money] for more than half of the top 20 law schools. The results ranged from 29% all the way down to 8.5%. When I spoke about my results to the CFO at a top 5 law school, they told me that they had already done the exact same study, and got the exact same results.
As to whether law schools' grades reflect a true ranking of students' performances according to a Platonic ideal of excellence, I don't really know. I do know that there is a very significant, positive correlation between the grades that any given student gets in one class and the grades they get in other classes. Thus, however professors are grading, they all tend to be doing more or less the same thing. This does not mean that every professor will grade every student in exactly the same way that every other professor will grade the students, but the general tendency is undeniable.Anonymous wrote:I have a couple of questions:
This is more than a couple of questions. I will answer a few of them. Others can also chime in.
1. Unauthorized practice of law (UPL) - My understanding is that there is no clear line where practicing law begins and ends outside of litigating in court and providing a legal opinion. It seems that traditional legal services are under assault by legal tech, the big 4/consultants, and general cost cutting. For example, shifting previous attorney roles to lesser paid compliance roles; having compliance consultants copy in-house counsel to obtain attorney-client privilege on certain matters; or tax accountants editing formation/merger documents. Do you see this trend continuing I do see this trend continuing. It has been going on for decades. Big accounting firms have been pushing into tax practice for more than a couple of decades. The high cost of elite lawyers gives clients an incentive to find cheaper ways to get service. and how do you think it will affect the already saturated legal market? Should law schools do something either by changing what is taught or better defining the practice of law to protect the value of the JD? Law schools are not in charge of defining the practice of law. If we were in charge we would definitely define it broadly and have large punishments for violating the rules. This issue is, in general, up to state legislatures, often executed through authority delegated to state bar associations.
2. Legal education - It seems legal education has stagnated for sometime. What needs to be updates to contend with the current job market and prepare students for the future impacts of things like AI? I guarantee you that the biggest topic in front the faculty and administration at every top 50 law school (and probably the rest, as well) is how to best respond to AI. Every law dean and professor understands that law schools will have to change. But, exactly how to change, and how to effectively manage that change, is completely up for grabs. Do you think schools can evolve to tackle these issues? Or will schools fail to evolve like after the introduction of ediscovery (where the big 4 ended up setting up ediscovery groups and the lawyers ended up in doc review)?
3. Cost - It seems to me that making law school a graduate program has allowed schools to exponentially up the cost due to the way loans are distributed (no caps for grad school loans, while undergraduate loans have caps). Did the institutions you worked at ever siphone money paid by the law students to subsidize other programs or initiatives that would not have a direct or indirect benefit on the law students? Given that law school admissions generally requires no pre-requisite classwork or specific work experience, it seems there would be a benefit to moving it back to a undergraduate degree to lower costs via the cap on student loans and by not requiring students to pay for a bachelors first. Where do you stand on maintaining the JD graduate scheme? If for the status quo, what are the benefits of keeping the JD a graduate degree? Law schools have been graduate schools in the US for much more than a century. I see no move to make the law degree an undergraduate major in this country. FWIW, about 20 years ago Japan transitioned to graduate legal education. See https://jle.aals.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150&context=home. As to whether some law schools offer programs or initiatives that have little direct effect on most students, I have no doubt that a number of schools do this. Where their funds come from I don't know.
4. Curves/grading - How accurate do you think schools are at ranking students along the curve? After discussions with how some of my professors graded work, I was already concerned that there was some margin of error in ranking, but my law school experience led me to believe that it was higher than I imagined (eg, while drinking scotch on a plane). Some schools also have moved to the honors/pass/fail grading system. Do you think that system better captures students ability/potential?