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[quote=Anonymous]I've posted before - I am a law professor some direct experience in law school admissions (at a top-tier but non-T14 law school). Only the few very top law schools (possibly even just Yale and Stanford, as the previous poster said) have anything like the holistic admissions of undergrad. Law schools, even the large majority of the T14, are extremely stats-driven. If you are above the median GPA/LSAT for a given law school and don't have a major negative (like a DUI, academic dishonesty, etc.), you are very likely to get in. If you are below the medians, you are very unlikely to get in, even with a compelling personal story. Where it gets more unpredictable is for students who are right around the median, or above one median but a little below the other. For those students, their undergraduate institution (as well as the rigor of their major/courseload) might come into play in the sense that a 3.9 from an Ivy will be better regarded than a 3.9 from a non-state flagship. But if the student's GPA is above the median at the law school they are applying to and they have a strong LSAT to go with it, it is unlikely to matter very much where their degree is from; conversely, a top undergrad won't matter much if they're below the medians.

Elite colleges are far overrepresented at top schools because 1) those schools grade-inflate, so it is generally easier to have a high GPA there; 2) their students have far higher LSATs on average, and the LSAT is a very important part of the process; 3) at the couple of law schools that are more holistic and for applicants in the middle of the pack for a particular law school, going to an elite college helps a little bit. That means that on balance, yes, there's a slight advantage to undergrad prestige. However, other factors are significantly more important, and the outsize presence of students from elite colleges at T14s is probably more about correlation than causation.

And this may change over the next several years, but at the moment AI is in no way capable of performing reliable legal research.[/quote]

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