Will I learn more at one law school compared to another?

[romothesavior]

How could anyone but a transfer student even answer this question? Even with transfers their experience is questionable because there's such a culture jump between 1L and 2L*. 1L you gotta hustle to get the grades to get the jobs, and all your classmates are doing the same (with the possible exception of electives). 2L it's much more relaxed - for both you and your classmates.

*at least, that's how I find it to be at UVA.

It's kind of like how people on here talk about how you wont find a job as a lawyer after law school, and most of them are in law school, or haven't started yet.

No, its actually nothing at all like that. One is easily quantifiable. One is not.

[AffordablePrep]

Depends on you more than a school. If you have seasonal affective disorder, you'll likely learn more at St. Thomas than Cornell, but do you really learn quantifiable material in LS, and is it really important? All that matters are grades and personalities? How frequently will some constitutional law from 1814 come up at a corporate firm?

[WSJ_Law]

Depends on you more than a school. If you have seasonal affective disorder, you'll likely learn more at St. Thomas than Cornell, but do you really learn quantifiable material in LS, and is it really important? All that matters are grades and personalities? How frequently will some constitutional law from 1814 come up at a corporate firm?

LOL but this isn't really saying much. Obviously one would learn more at Cooley than Harvard if person never attended a day of class or read a single page at HLS...but in order to make these situations comparable (i.e., to avoid the obvious pitfall of saying Cooley > Harvard) and analogies valid one sees the importance of using an "average student standard" and refraining from ascribing "seasonal affective disorders" or other outlier-ish afflictions like never reading or attending class. To do what you just did is akin to intellectual sleight of hand.

[nealric]

The real learning takes place once you start practicing. This is why what you learn in law school is mostly irrelevant. You need a law school that will place you in a job where you are in a position to learn.

[WSJ_Law]

The real learning takes place once you start practicing. This is why what you learn in law school is mostly irrelevant. You need a law school that will place you in a job where you are in a position to learn.

So therefore no learning takes place in law school?
> No. Clearly at least some learning takes place at school.

Is that learning, albeit small and arguably out of touch with the profession's needs in the real world, of uniform quality at every law school in America?
> No. Some are worse than others, even if only slightly.

So will someone learn more at one law school compared to at least one other?
> Yes.

[Jurist11]

If you go to a lower rank school, you WILL get a high quality of education..but...there's a cost associated with that and a risk

The risk is, your only prospects of getting a decent job are to perform Extremely well in school. But, everyone else has the same thing in mind, so competition is very fierce. Also, the workload is OUTRAGEOUS, which makes you have to work that much harder. Harder work means you get more from the education, theoretically. So the cost is an enormous amount of dedicated and extremely hard work.

If you can't handle that for absolute certainty, don't. Even. Think. About. It.
If you're certain you can handle harder work than you've probably done in your entire lifetime, lower rank has it's benefits.

[bdubs]

Having just started law school I can see that an argument could be made that the substance of the course materials is the same, and the faculty (teaching) quality may even be comparable between lower T1/T2 and T14. However, I think there is something to be said from learning from your classmates and the class discussion, which I can't help but think would suffer if you were surrounded by people who barely scraped by on their LSAT or in undergrad.

People who do end up at T14s also make stupid comments, but I can't imagine they are as frequent or disruptive as they could be if left to a classroom of people who are all really struggling to understand the material.

[shoeshine]

People who do end up at T14s also make stupid comments, but I can't imagine they are as frequent or disruptive as they could be if left to a classroom of people who are all really struggling to understand the material.

I think it is worse at my T14. Since everyone understands the material so there is a lot of time to try and discuss the nuances in the common law which leads to really arbitrary hypos. I literally think my classmates make up ridiculous hypos the night before to use in class.

Last week we had time travel, automated weaponry, and incest all brought up in Civ Pro hypos. It wasn't even torts!

[prezidentv8]

learning from your classmates and the class discussion

LOL