<p>I know a guy who chose Harvard over Yale. </p>
<p>Just wondering, what factors would make you choose H over Y, when Y seems and as far as I know is better than H?</p>
<p>I chose HLS over YLS for a few reasons. First of all, location matters to me. I have friends in Boston, and it’s a far more interesting city than New Haven. Second, though some people think Harvard’s large class sizes are a draw back, I see it as an opportunity to make that many more connections and friends. And finally, I don’t have an interest in academia, so I wasn’t particularly drawn to Yale’s navel-gazing reputation.</p>
<p>Obama went to Harvard Law.</p>
<p>Hillary went to Yale Law School.</p>
<p>Who works for who?</p>
<p>I’d go to H just for the JD/MBA program, not that Y doesn’t have one but H is in T3 for both business and law while Y is #1 for law, yet T15 for business. If only for the law aspect, I’ve heard that Y is more modern and more practical. It all depends on your likes/dislikes and perspectives.</p>
<p>I’m thinking location, location, and if your partner were enrolling at a graduate school at Harvard or the Boston area.</p>
<p>If I were fortunate enough, I’d seriously consider it because I’ve been part of a small, intimate learning environment all my life. It’d be fun to get lost in the crowd and force oneself to make connections.</p>
<p>Now, now. Many Harvard Law grads worked for Gerry Ford when he was president, and others worked for Bill Clinton when he was president.</p>
<p>A former acting dean from my law school (who transferred from Berkeley to Harvard his second year before transferring back to Berkeley his third year) describes HLS as a samurai ring where the most ambitious students can go to test their mettle.</p>
<p>Yale’s law school is more selective, but provides a less competitive environment. (I suspect the difference in selectivity is purely a function of size. You could probably select a group of students at HLS the size of Yale’s class who have undergraduate credentials that are at least the equal of Yale’s class.)</p>
<p>Graybeard,
slightly off topic, but how did your dean end up transferring twice, to his old school!?
I can imagine Harvard Law being really different from Berkeley Law, but…
transferring twice!!! wow…</p>
<p>He’ll never be a good lawyer then; he changes his mind too much.</p>
<p>Nice assumption. You are forgetting that not every school will be a match for everyone. Just because it is Harvard does not mean he liked the environment, teaching style, students, and surrounding area better. It’s really like beauty which is in the eye of the beholder.</p>
<p>Yale and Harvard have very different admission processes. Harvard seems more number driven. Yale applications are reviewed by faculty members who, as I understand it, decide whether a given student sounds like someone they would like to teach. Some people get into Yale but are turned down by Harvard. Probably a higher percentage are accepted at H but are rejected at Y. Then, there is a group that is accepted at both. I would imagine that is not a large group of people. Yet even in that select group, some turn their backs on both Y and H to go to Stanford or even to take the full ride at Mich, Col, or elsewhere! Everyone has their own criteria for making this big choice, but isn’t nice to have such options?</p>
<p>And Reagan went to Eureka undergrad, never attended Law School, and had Attorneys General from both Harvard (Smith) and Yale (Meese).</p>
<p>Robert Berring, former acting dean at Berkeley’s law school (and former dean of Berkeley’s library school) was editor of the Harvard Lampoon as an undergraduate. He enrolled in a joint degree program with the library school at Berkeley as well as the law school, but felt that the students are Boalt were kind of curthroat, so he transferred to Harvard after his first year. As he told it to me, it was one of those “out of the frying pan, into the fire” experiences, and he transferred back a year later.</p>
<p>When I met him, he was a professor of law, and the head librarian at the law school at Berkeley. (He had completed his master’s degree in library science.) He later became dean of the school of library science at Berkeley, and later on, became acting dean at the law school there after the previous dean resigned.</p>
<p>I think Robert Berring is a professor emeritus now. He was a brilliant, wonderfully funny man who was my faculty advisor for an independent study project on the treatment of murder in the Anglo-American folk ballad; the title was “He Cut His Bride’s Head From Her Shoulders, and and He Threw It Against the Wall”. (That was actually a common line in many of the folks tunes memorialized in the Childe Ballads.)</p>
<p>^^Wow… I’m currently taking Legal Studies 39B at Berkeley with Prof. Berring. (He still teaches at Boalt, and he’s an admissions officer as well.) </p>
<p>He’s such a great, hilarious, brilliant professor! I really want to get a recommendation letter from him some day.</p>
<p>lol @ BusinessLaw</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Harry Truman never even earned a degree at all, not even a bachelor’s. Yet he still (briefly) had a Harvard Law graduate, Francis Biddle, as Attorney General. </p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln didn’t even go to high school. He was almost entirely self-taught with perhaps 18 months of formal schooling of any sort in his entire life. Yet he was still able to work as a lawyer for many years.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>i can’t say what is true today, but when i attended YLS a very high percentage of my class mates had also been accepted at HLS. there were a few who hadn’t applied to HLS and a few who were rejected by HLS.</p>
<p>About three-quarters of those accepted by YLS enroll. Of those who do not, the majority choose Harvard. A VERY large percentage of those who do went to Harvard undergrad. Sometimes the choice is a monetary one–they know they can get a job as a law tutor in one of the undergraduate houses --usually the one they belong(ed) to. Others do it because they have a significant other and there are more jobs and other options in Boston than in New Haven. So, you’re down to about 12-13% of those admitted to YLS who don’t choose to go to YLS or HLS. My understanding–which I admit is anecdotal–is that the majority of those in that group choose to take a different life path, e.g, by enrolling in a Ph.D. program or even going to work. The % turning YLS down for Stanford law has never exceeded 5%–and most years it doesn’t come close to that. There are a few people who turn down YLS each year for the Levy or Furman or Hamilton, etc., but never more than a handful.</p>