Law School Question

<p>175 is what mine got, too. He was admitted to Penn and Georgetown despite a mediocre GPA. Great score, congrats!</p>

<p>"Smaller more "local NYC based" firms might see Fordham as a plus- whereas the NYC based "National Firms" may still give the nod to Vanderbilt, USC etc. "</p>

<p>marny--I respectfully suggest that you are reading something into willow's post that isn't there. She said that coming from Vandy was as advantageous as coming from Fordham applying to top NYC firms, NOT that it was better. Nobody's comments support the conclusion that any large NYC firm would prefer a Vandy grad to a Fordham grad.You would certainly have a lot fewer mentors among the partners at most firms.</p>

<p>jonri- Thanks-- Upon re-reading the posts I think I realized that too. I'll have all this info available for my d when the time comes. I'll probably print this out and let her look at it when it's closer to application/acceptance time.<br>
As she really may not be applying until fall '08, I will really freak her out if I share these insights with her now.<br>
Thanks again.</p>

<p>I am hoping Georgetown (there's always P/T ) and Cornell come through for her- so that would make the decision alot easier as she'll have some choices in the T 14 category. Her #'s are really in line with their acceptances.</p>

<p>marny1, thanks. He'd been doing practice tests at 179 for the two weeks prior to the test and was bummed out immediately after the real test because he "spaced out" and got behind on time and had only 3 minutes to do the last four questions. Then he "panicked" and rushed through them. Of those four, he answered 3 wrong, four wrong total. Sigh. Had he kept his focus, he likely would have missed only the 1 question because the last section was one of his stronger question types (logic something). That would have been a 180. Oh well. As for getting into Boalt, I don't think it's a possibilty. He still has 2 years left of undergrad at Cal, but his gpa probably can't rise much above a 3.4 or 3.5 . Which puts him rather out of range of Boalt. He had a bad semester this year, dealing with some issues that seem to have resolved, but the damage is done and he's not a nose to the grindstone student, so I doubt he'll get the stellar grades that would make it possible to show Boalt that the one semester was an aberation. He's just sort of a roller coaster, always has been with grades. I was hoping college would be different, but alas... Still, we are happy for him. A 175 will help by giving him some solid options at least</p>

<p>Roscoe, where did your kid end up going for law school? And what went into his decision? (I don't think H and I will have alot of input into where S decides to go, which is fine with us, but like marny1, I enjoy learning about these things and giving hints or tips when the time is right.)</p>

<p>LakeWashington, thank you for the information. There are no lawyers in my family, so I don't know the most basic things about law school or law. I probably should have known that civil rights law would be foundational though, duh. :)</p>

<p>Don't count him out so quickly--look at the official #s. Go to <a href="http://www.lsac.org%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.lsac.org&lt;/a>. Click on the link at left that says something like Official Guide to ABA Law Schools. Then you'll see a link that enables you to search based on UG GPA and LSAT. Let him see how much difference an extra .1 or .2 can make to his odds.</p>

<p>Mom, S went to Penn due to the small class size, proximity to NYC (our home), a good reaction upon attending Admitted Student weekend, and yes, the high ranking and Ivy rep. He just finished the 1L year and is staying in Phila for the summer, interning with a federal judge. He's very happy with his situation; Penn is a very collegial school and both students and faculty are A+ in quality.</p>

<p>Other main choices were Georgetown, Fordham, and Cardozo with a big scholarship. Right or wrong, we saw C as a big step down in quality, and F as a small but significant step down. And G, while it is a superb school with A+++ facilities and the excitement of Washington, just seemed too big at 550 per class. S had gone undergrad to a huge school (Cornell) and wanted a more intimate atmosphere for a change.</p>

<p>Having championed Fordham in prior posts, I do want to say that it is possible to go too far in its favor. You have to consider what happens to the student if he ends up in the bottom half of the class at Fordham and doesn't have outstanding interview/networking skills. I think such a student is at a disadvantage in the job market against, say, Duke, UVa, Cornell, Northwestern or G-town students who come with the ready-made cachet of a "T14." This is why I would've urged Georgetown over Fordham to S had it come to that. I recognize that there are reasonable alternate viewpoints but I think there's something to say for branding, and the Georgetown, Cornell, etc. brands are still superior to the Fordham one; and I would say this is so even in NYC.</p>

<p>Roscoe- as another NY parent, I think my kid may be applying to alot of the same schools your son applied to including Fordham and Cardoza ( maybe Brooklyn too) and a bunch of the T-14's you mentioned.<br>
Definitely keeping all this info to draw upon when the time comes!!</p>

<p>Roscoe- your last posting reminded me of some info my d passed along from her Kaplan Instructor. She took her course upstate NY, so you know alot of these higher achieving kids are going to apply to NYU, Columbia, Cornell, & Fordham ( and a host of other schools).
His take was that the kids who are below the T-14 schools, often have to work harder-- find themselves in a more competitive environment and a less congenial atmosphere. Basically this is because the competition becomes a bit more fierce as these kids want to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack. Of course this may hold more true to NY kids as the competition is more fierce in the NY market. It's not just our NY sons and daughters competing for "home town jobs". NY kids will be competing with the best and brightest from All over the country.
The T-14 "brand" in itself may give the kid an advantage.
Who said Life was Fair.</p>

<p>Thanks, Roscoe. It sounds like your S made a great decision for himself. Does he have a speciality in mind for his law career? Also, if you don't mind sharing, what was his gpa? Was Penn considered a reach for him? Do you think the fact that he went to Cornell helped (plus the high LSAT, of course)?</p>

<p>Marny1, good point on the competition factor. My friend's son who went to UCLA law said the competition was pretty brutal. He was actually really taken aback (he'd graduated from Berkeley several years earlier but wasn't prepared for the level of intensity of his law school classmates).</p>

<p>GPA was only about 3.3 so he was a "splitter" and I thought Penn was 50/50. I have no doubt the Cornell (Arts & Scis) degree helped. No specialty planned except some sort of litigation.</p>

<p>paco de lucia,
would it be possible to apply, be accepted, and then defer your enrollment at the chosen law school for one year? i recall meeting a student last year who I think mentioned that he was considering this as an option. seems to me like he had acceptances from several but was going to go on a peace corp type option for a year.</p>

<p>thanks to everyone for posting. this is a very helpful thread.</p>

<p>Why do it matter so much what law school one goes to? One would think that the bar association would try to make all law schools comparable to one another....</p>

<p>That cannot be done, and it does matter a great deal to which school one goes, not for "prestige" but for the actual education. You can get crappy lawyers from Yale, and good ones from the University of Miami, but odds are the better the school, the brighter and more able the attorney.</p>

<p>^Understandable on a numbers stand point school selectively; however, as competitive and difficult it is to become a law professor I don't get how can one receive a crappy law education. But I'm just a high school grad just speculating because, I introduce Judge Greg Mathis at an event, recently, and he got his J.D. from University of Detroit. (And I don't even want to know how that law school stands in the "rankings") yet he was elected over Harvard and Michigan grads as superior court judge for Michigan 36th District Court.</p>

<p>State judges = elections = local politics plus raising money to run (usually from the plaintiff's bar and unions in a northeastern city). Courthouse ties are far more important than skill. You won't find too many Harvard law grads on state trial courts, although at the appellate levels there are a few more. Politics aren't completely absent, of course, from federal judicial appointments, but skill and the regard of other lawyers are far more important criteria than they are in the state nomination system. On the federal bench, you find a lot of graduates of high-prestige law schools.</p>

<p>I agree with JHS.</p>

<p>Michigan's 36th District Court and all similar state courts of primary jurisdiction are not now, and never have been, attractive to top law graduates. All you have to do is look and see who ends up "trying" cause celebre cases--OJ, Paris, Anna Nicole--and you get a window into the type of person who presides on our state court benches. Mr. Mathis may be a fine guy, and he might even be a good judge, but I would not ever be impressed with anyone just because they are a state court judge. In many states, even the state supreme court judges are elected. In New York, as is reflected on Law and Order (where the judges are far better in temperament and intellect than real ones) the lowest trial court of general jurisdiction is called the "Supreme Court," an odd artifact.</p>

<p>Thanks 4 the info. I didn't know it wasn't impressive. My bad... But I did mention him because me and him to share a similar background. Just something that was on my mind.</p>

<p>Anecdote time; Chief Justice Warren Burger attended law school part-time at a less well known institution. Justice Powell was a Washington and Lee Law graduate. President Bush II wanted to place Harriet Myers on the court. And I'll wager that having a Ivy Law degree could be a demerit for applicants to the Bush Department of Justice. In time, Bush/Rove supporters will probably put a Regent University Law graduate on the important DC circuit.</p>

<p>Well, Lewis Powell got his law degree from W&L, but he then went and got a further law degree from Harvard. Chief Justice Burger was a real anomaly on the modern Supreme Court. In the past 50 years, the only other Supreme Court Justice with a comparable legal education was Charles Whittaker, who essentially had a nervous breakdown on the Court after four years. Thurgood Marshall also graduated from a less well-known law school, although the historical reasons for that are significantly different from those applicable to Burger. Increasingly over the years, U.S. Supreme Court Justices have come from a very short list of law schools. In the past 40 years, 19 Justices have been appointed, and except for Burger and Marshall all of them have had degrees from Harvard (8, counting Powell), Yale (5), Stanford (2) or Northwestern (2).</p>

<p>Harriet Miers: There's an example of a successful appointment! Did it help her that she had gone to law school at SMU? I think not.</p>

<p>As for the D.C. Circuit, maybe Lake Washington knows something, but the current roster is a lot of Harvard, Yale, Chicago, UNC, and UVa (plus one senior judge who went to, and taught at, Michigan, and one judge who went to UCLA but got a graduate law degree from UVa).</p>

<p>Marshall went to Howard Law (Top Research level HBCU) --first school nation to have classes in civil law (stated in Vernon Jordan autobiography) and served as a catalysis for attorneys for the civil rights era. All the black lawyer who served or augured in court have some type of connection to Howard Law. However, today ranks indicated that Howard law is fourth tier.</p>