Top Law Schools

shmoo597 wrote:I'm a 1L, but I've stayed totally clueless to this whole process. Can someone explain what the competition is like? You have 1 week to do what exactly? Does it involve a lot of blue book corrections?

stad2234 wrote:I know that some schools will allow you to grade-on to law review. Where do you typically have to be in the class to have this opportunity?

imchuckbass58 wrote:

stad2234 wrote:I know that some schools will allow you to grade-on to law review. Where do you typically have to be in the class to have this opportunity?

Few top schools have straight grade-ons. For most there are pure write-on spots, and some sports which are a combination of write-on and grades. For some schools, this basically means if you have top grades, you are basically on if you make a good effort. For others, it genuinely is a hybrid process and you can compensate for great-but-not-stellar grades by doing well on the write-on.

If a school follows the former process ("legitimate effort"), you probably have to be at the very top - i.e., top 20-25 people in the class. If the school follows the latter, you probably still need to be somewhere in the top third to quarter to stand a shot at one of the grade-conscious spots.

Edit: These are guesses since nobody actually knows who grades on and who writes on, but I would say that's the "conventional wisdom."

thesealocust wrote:Here's how UVA does it:

1) the top 25 GPAs are offered a spot (thus the GPA cutoff changes every year, usually in the low 3.7X range). If spot 25 is a tie, then it's possible for more than 25 to grade on. That translates to roughly speaking the top 6-7% of the class.
2) After that, the best 15 writing competitions (10 page essay from hundreds of pages of source material + editing/bluebook checking a pre-written 10 page piece) with no reference at all to grades or GPA
3) After that, up to 5 people who had top 1/3 GPA (~3.42) and top 1/3 writing competition scores + wrote a diversity essay might get a spot. But not all of these spots are used.

Interestingly, they tell nobody how they got on but do publish the GPA cut off - so people will know whether or not they are in camp 1, but not whether or not they are in camp 2 or 3 if they make it (unless they declined to write the essay, but we were encouraged to write the statement even if our diversity was an interesting undergraduate background as opposed to something more traditionally associated with diversity hiring, so it's a bit of a black box).

I have no idea how it compares to other schools.