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.
And how do you get in to Harvard or Yale law?