And how do you get in to Harvard or Yale law?
Generally?
1) Be a legacy admit. This is the easiest way to get into Yarvard Law.
2) Be an Ivy League undergraduate. This is the second easiest way to get into Yarvard Law, because you have the opportunity to get law professors to vouch for your admission even before you apply, and the grade inflation in the Ivies means that your transcript will easily beat any student that went to a public university or college.
3) Be a token minority student (i.e., not White or any type of Asian) with excellent grades that graduates top of your undergraduate class, because Yarvard Law needs token minority admissions every year to put on their brochures. (In Yarvard's defense, this is true of almost every law school.)
4) Be rich and do things during college that most people can't do during their summers, like volunteering at the Hague, or having your parents make a generous donation to the school.
5) If there are any spots remaining after categories 1-4, excel at the LSATs, get a 4.0 GPA in undergraduate (the major does not matter), and ace the admissions interview. Generally, there are only a handful of spots remaining by this point so you are competing with thousands of other applicants for a dozen or so spots. (In this regard, Legally Blonde is actually pretty spot on: a 4.0 in a fluff major is just as good as a 4.0 in an engineering major for Yarvard admissions purposes.)
I’m not saying it’s not a thing: Yale in particular may have different rules since they’re at the very top. But law school admissions are heavily heavily affect by gpa/LSAT medians. School rankings rise and fall based on those, and there’s no fudging it.
I just searched the forum and the consensus seems to be legacy is at most a small soft, unless the parent is a large donor. (Softs tend not to count for much in law school apps unless you already pass the medians)
https://www.reddit.com/r/lawschooladmissions/search?q=Legacy...
Harvard Law admitted to using legacy admissions in 2017, when it announced it was reducing (but not eliminating) the practice.
And with all due respect, redditors' opinions are not authoritative on this matter, especially when they conflict with the actual statements of one of the institutions under discussion...
But law school admissions are heavily heavily affect by gpa/LSAT medians. School rankings rise and fall based on those, and there’s no fudging it.
Law school rankings are not based solely on GPA/LSAT scores. Numerous other factors go into the "rankings" and the weightings are modified every year, including the respective weight given to GPA/LSAT scores. Given that LSAT scores are no longer required at Harvard, you should be familiar with the reduction in weight given to LSAT scores in the rankings for the 2018 year and onward.
LSAT and gpa are the only student specific ranking factors. And bar passage/placement, but those correlate with grades which correlate with LSAT/gpa.
It’s really what the schools care about: the rankings matter. LSAT/gpa are what affect their rankings, so they’re the governing interest.
Legacy is on their forms, but my point is it is not a large factor at the law school level.
All the top admissions consultants are part of that admissions forum. If your only source of knowledge is reading what schools say then you don’t really have experience in how what they do differs.
Undergrad is one thing, grad and law schools are something entirely different. You want a shot at Yale Law, you'd better be bringing something extra to the table. Maybe you did research into a novel, niche and esoteric area of finance at the London School of Economics before working in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street for [insert big name here] fund? Maybe you've been doing UN Observer work in the Congo? Maybe you helped Norway work through the technical hurdles of exploration in the North Cuba Basin?
But dropping out of a vagina that happened to be in a Penthouse on 5th Ave? I can tell you right now, that's not going to get you very far. You'd be surprised how many people are born to wealthy parents. Neither is being non-white likely to help you much. It may also surprise you how many non-whites there are in the world.
But be of good cheer. All hope is not lost for the ludicrously wealthy, or the non-white. Are you ludicrously wealthy and/or non-white, and a principal engineer or project manager on the Grand Renaissance Dam? I can guarantee, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale want to speak with you.
Getting good LSAT scores along with bringing something to the table is the quickest way into these schools.
> Neither is being non-white likely to help you much
Oh please. I actually think this is a good thing, but you're kidding yourself if you think being a non-Asian minority isn't an absolutely massive boost, even in professional school (and note: law school isn't grad school).
Similarly, the parents of influential and well-connected children will get a second look, plus as others have mentioned - many of the tasks you are listing are limited to the wealthy.
It definitely takes merit to get into Yale law - but even with merit it is a crapshoot. Being rich, well-connected, or the benefit of affirmative action policies gives you a step up there. This is also true for HMS.
how does this in any way equate to "token"?
This article has stats. Harvard boosts urm admissions by 10,000%, Yale by 800%. Data from 2017. This means they get in with lower gpa’s and lower LSAT scores. A .10-.11 gpa difference for yale-harvard and a 5-7 point LSAT differential.
https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/do-underrepresented-minorit...
My guess is that most of the low merit admits are people with significant political influence that the school thinks it would be beneficial for law students to network with (people like Hunter Biden who went to Yale law, Tiffany Trump, etc.) Those people are never going to get close to an actual clerkship though.
Could those downvoting explain why?
... who went to Georgetown law (typically in the 10-20 rank range).
Note that this is the best she could do when her father was running for president.
She never showed up on that list. Ergo, she did not have a competitive GPA. It's possible she may have had a good LSAT, but she would have needed a very high score to offset the low GPA.
As Georgetown Law appears to have been the most prestigious law school that would admit her, this suggests she was a "legacy" admit (meaning, admitted due to her parents or application sponsors rather than on her own merits).
I only highlighted her name to demonstrate that celebrity and money can only get you so far. Georgetown is a perfectly fine law school, but it’s a far cry from Harvard or Yale law schools.
Yield calculations have a lot to do with legacy admission rates.
A legacy with a 1600 has a substantially higher chance, due to their parents alma mater, than a non-legacy with a 1600.
But to be clear: I'm not trying to claim that there is no legacy preference and that it can be all explained by test scores. It is definitely a big factor.
The only two points I was making is that 1. traditional "legacy" admissions is not necessarily the route that a lot of students without any merit are getting into these top schools - they often have separate pathways for donors and super elite individuals, like Harvard's "z-list."
2. Legacy admissions are because schools know that if they admit more legacy, they will get more donations - but it also has to do with calculations about selectivity. Harvard wants to maximize the chances that the people it admits will choose Harvard so that they don't have to admit more people to fill the class thus raising the admission rate.
And your clarifications really don't address that, and you even seem to back away from it now. Why even make the absurd claim about the intellectual and test-taking superiority of legacies over the peasants if it isn't significant - as you're now claiming?
All I wanted to clarify is that these legacy processes only really come into play once you have already hit some minimum threshold of merit, and there are different backdoors for super rich/connected applicants that require no such threshold.
Tests are not the same thing as intellect - they are often structured in a way that is unfair to people with low incomes (for instance: the more times you pay to take a test, you can then select the top scores). All of these are pathways that would still exist without legacy.
You're construing my comment as taking a stance that it wasn't - but in case it wasn't clear now, legacy admissions are unequivocally bad. Privileging class status in admissions is obviously bad.
This implies it is the one with the highest average Leetcode score. LSAT is basically an IQ plus time spent practicing test. Hey that actually sounds kind of familiar!
I laughed really hard at that one. Being good at the LSAT has absolutely no connection to one's skills as a lawyer, and generally isn't even very predictive of performance in law school.
While good lawyers come out of Yarvard, the quality of their graduates is no different from most other law schools. The only difference is that a Yarvard Law graduate will make sure to tell you they went to Yarvard Law.
I’ll call BS on this. Yarvard grads are going to be better than a typical law school grad, simply because a large percentage of their graduates were the top applicants to law schools across the nation. Saying otherwise would indicate other schools give a better education than these 2 schools, which would be farcical.
You got any sources for any of your claims? They come off as bitterness on your end.
Saying otherwise would indicate other schools give a better education than these 2 schools, which would be farcical.
Many schools give a better legal education than Yarvard. Their reputation outside of the legal industry is better than their reputation within it (except among Yarvard graduates). For example, when it comes to legal specialties (i.e., focused on specific areas of law), Yarvard only takes top ranking in constitutional law, i.e., the one area where almost all of the lawyers are graduates of Yarvard due to alumni hiring preferences among the judiciary. Unlike the general rankings, whose methodology largely consists of polling Yarvard graduates working at law schools about how they feel law schools should be ranked, the specialty rankings are based on surveys of people actually practicing in those fields. (US News includes information about its methodology in all of its rankings, so you can visit their site for more detail but you might need to pay to get the full info.)
Law firms hire Yarvard graduates because clients like to see those diplomas, but Yarvard graduates don't perform any better in practice than other lawyers. The worst lawyers I have ever met were Yarvard graduates; some of the best lawyers I have ever met went to 4-year evening programs at their local law school, and none of the best lawyers I met were Yarvard graduates though other schools in the Top14 did feature prominently in that group. (My personal experience with Yarvard grads: when I practiced trial law, I was undefeated against Yarvard graduates. When I switched to transactional practice, for several years I worked with Yarvard lawyers who couldn't negotiate their way out of a paper bag and frequently got stuck cleaning up the mess they made, which is probably where the chip comes from.)
I've had the opportunity to apply for a few british and french things in school/academia and both required that I take a test - and were actually more test-driven than the US appeared to be, with explicit harsh cutoffs based on your test score's z-score.
Before even moving on in the Oxford application process for physics, for instance, you have to first pass a test putting yourself 1.5 z-scores over the average, then pass a series of interviews where you are timed on your ability to ask questions to you posed in person. And that's already after your A-level exams in highschool or whatever.
Most Supreme Court clerks come from about 5 schools (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia). Getting into one of those law schools is based almost entirely on an index score combining LSAT score and GPA. Then, getting a clerkship with a “feeder” appellate judge is almost entirely a function of blind-graded exams in law school.
“Connections” matter to a degree (working with the right law professors to get good recommendations) but it’s a highly structured process.
[1] Now it’s fair to say that LSAT doesn’t measure anything important. But doing well on the LSAT and getting a good GPA doesn’t require “connections.”
I dispute that assertion, given that Yarvard no longer assigns grades to law school classes. Thus, it becomes almost entirely a matter of connections, even more so than it was before when they actually did give their students grades. The only difference is that Yarvard students who would have once been prioritized for clerkships on the basis of academic success are now losing clerkship positions to fellow students with better connections than them. While I don't feel sorry for those students, it has had the knock-on effect of making it even more difficult for non-Yarvard students to get clerkships.
“Connections” matter to a degree (working with the right law professors to get good recommendations) but it’s a highly structured process.
The connection to the right law professor doesn't just matter to a degree. It's the single most important factor in determining what students will land federal judicial clerkships. The NALP conducted a study on this, and found that more than 1/3rd of federal judicial clerkship positions went to students/graduates that personally knew the judge they clerked for (generally on the basis of meeting the judges at law school functions). In contrast, state judicial clerkships were generally assigned on the basis of merit, with few if any of the clerks knowing their judges prior to clerking for them.
What are you basing this on? Shouldn’t the Supreme Court and those working for them be the best legal minds in the country? No one would say “the field of physics would be better off if we had more mediocre physicists doing the important research”.
Unfortunately it creates a self-perpetuating situation. The rationale is understandable. People always prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. But it leads to these situations.
One possible fix would be for Congress to remove the justices' right to select their own clerks, and for that selection to be moved to a third-party, like the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Justice Department.
Legitimacy w.r.t. what? What is it that the Supreme Court has that congress is lacking?
A basic perception of goodwill and competence?
The Supreme Court has a very narrow mission statement, and it generally executes on it well.
Congresspeople sabre rattle on TV, submit symbolic legislation with poison pills and take turns abstaining on legislation they don't want passed but their constituents do, and hide whatever they want to pass in unrelated legislation (budgets, usually). They eagerly devolve every responsibility they can to the executive branch, and seem incapable of voting against their own or the intelligence community's interests.
The only principled one seem to be single-issue legislators who couldn't tell the ass-end of a horse from its head if it was unrelated to their obsession.
During depositions they spend more time chasing soundbites and executing partisan jabs than trying to extract any information in the public interest.
Many of them seem to care more about the rest of the country than they ever could about their district or their states.
Edit:
As a punctuation, here's the late John McCain's wife saying 'we all knew', wrt Eptsein
I think the arguments (that go against yours) in this article are relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-case-for-e...
But molany of the examples he cites are exactly what the Supreme Court is suposed to be doing, serving to moore the federal government's reach into daily life, and local governance by interpreting the constitution, and leveraging historical precedent.
Initial appointment is inevitably a political affair. But once the justice is in, the justice is in, and you pray that their interpretation of law is what you wanted it to be, because you're not going to remove them.
Now, you could argue that the Supreme Court will increasingly lose its legitimacy, since a filibuster is no longer enough to prevent an overtly politically motivated appointment.
You could also argue thattimes have changed, and the relatively degenerate state of state level authority means that the confirmation process should be moved to the house, rather than the senate.
But these would be relatively new criticisms and proposals that have yet to be spread and be internalized widely enough as to make the whole institution illegitimate in the public's eye.
For example RBG has said several times that roe v wade was wrongly decided. An impartial judge would therefore believe in striking it down but she voted not to do so several times. Unfortunately many justices still believe that their job is not solely to interpret laws established via democratic processes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869
Congress has already established the composition and the procedures of the court. Of course it has that power.
All money spent by the federal government in all three branches, including on judicial clerk compensation salaries, is determined by Congressional authorization and congressional statutes regarding employment and compensation. Congressional statute law heavily regulates hiring throughout the executive branch, despite that being a separate branch of government from Congress. There's no reason the judiciary is any different.
What's more, while the procedural rules of the federal courts are mostly set by the federal courts themselves, this is done under the authority of an act of Congress, which has been amended several times both to increase and reduce the courts' self-regulatory authority. As for the Federal Rules of Evidence, Congress refused to allow the version of those which the Supreme Court originally approved to go into affect, and then they later passed a substantially altered version as an Act of Congress.
The Constitution itself makes explicit Congress's ability to regulate the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction (which applies to almost all of its docket) and even to reduce the scope of that jurisdiction. And it has pretty plenary power to add, remove, and restructure the inferior federal courts, aside from whatever tenure protections apply to individual judges who have not been impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.
And, as others have said, the Senate even individually approves federal judges as per its constitutional mandate under the appointments clause. This is certainly not a separation of powers violation.
Congress can ordain and establish inferior courts, and can regulate the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. However, it cannot regulate much of the judiciary outside that. For one, it cannot expand the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction. Marbury. Nor can it dictate how the court applies the law. Klein. Congress's power over the federal judiciary is constrained and there is no basis in the text of the Constitution or in any case law to support your position.
However, I think a variation of the idea would be constitutional: within the Supreme Court, Congress creates two divisions for purposes of appellate jurisdiction cases (they would stay unified for original jurisdiction cases to avoid a constitutional problem). Justices would be assigned to only one or the other, no overlap. One division handles constitutional appeals, one division handles other cases.
Congress could also remove the appellate jurisdiction of the court to hear claims that laws are unconstitutional, leaving the only appellate jurisdiction as claims that officials are acting illegally or unconstitutionally or disputes of lower-level decisions as incorrect.
I'm not saying this is necessary good policy, but it would be constitutional.
Yes, it does. Jurisdiction literally means the ability to say what the law is. There is no plausible definition of appellate jurisdiction in the Anglo-American legal tradition that would not involve the power and duty to reconcile incompatible sources of law.
> Congress could also remove the appellate jurisdiction of the court to hear claims that laws are unconstitutional
No, it cannot. First, the power to make "exceptions" does not imply the ability to completely remove power. Second, whatever power Congress had under Article III was limited by later amendments, e.g., it cannot remove jurisdiction in a way that results in an impingement on the right to due process under the Fifth Amendment. There is nothing in the text of the Constitution nor in any case law that would support your implicit contention that Article III is somehow immune to being subject to the amendments process.
Third, although Klein has been a bit disfavored lately, it was reaffirmed in Patchak only a couple years ago. Some commentators focus on the plurality opinion while ignoring the fact that they're only a plurality and not the dissent because of Ginsburg's and Sotomayor's concurrence. That opinion interpreted Congress's intent generously and reasoned that Congress merely amended its waiver of sovereign immunity rather than dictated a result in a particular case. Of note, the concurring opinion explicitly agreed in principle with the "dissent," and they still ruled substantively on the merits notwithstanding Congress's attempt to strip jurisdiction.
If you'd like to continue this, please read Chemerinsky's excellent hornbook on federal jurisdiction first. And, you know, maybe go to law school.
I'm not disagreeing with the other examples you gave, including about original jurisdiction - clearly separation of powers and the constitutional structure are both real and binding. But equally, those concerns don't prevent the kind of personnel regulation we're discussing.
But the power and precedent exists — see the Pendleton Civil Service Act. Even in these times, the federal bureaucracy is a significant barrier to systematic corruption and patronage.
More seriously, I'm not convinced moving this to a Senate subcommittee would lend any more legitimacy to the system. As evidence I present what Senate Republicans did to stonewall Obama appointees at the end of his last term so that McConnell et all could push through dozens of 30 year old reactionary freaks to lifetime appointments.
Is John Roberts going to whip out his checkbook to cover payroll?
Party politics has become an increasingly tit for tat series of one side violating a norm, followed by the other side one-upping them.
It's basically a war of attrition at this point.
Republicans are going to push through a new court appointee, largely "because fuck you, that's why."
If Democrats win control of either the Presidency or the Senate, expect them to do something similar. Also simply "because fuck you."
At some point it's going to all boil over, and who knows where that will end up.
Unfortunately, that requires adults who can work together and a public that can deal with nuance.
And betray on the last round, because that can only help you.
But since that means everyone should betray on the last round, everyone should also betray on the second last round since that won't effect your opponents behavior next round anyways (they're already going to betray).
And the third from last round.
And fourth...
And... actually just always betray.
Simple computer algorithms do not fully capture the real world. And the simple algorithm that happens to have won a single tournament in which players could not see what other players were doing and adjust their strategy is not going to translate well to the real world.
So literally nothing like the prisoner's dilemma, iterated or otherwise.
The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone.
So what are law firms paying for with these massive bonuses? Access, and knowledge. SCOTUS clerk almuni have access to SCOTUS judges, and knowledge of their judge's thought processes, biases, etc.