Top Law Schools

Hey guys, I'm not trying to come off as a complete slacker here but quality of life during law school is really important to me. Which of the top 14 law schools have a reputation for having a more relaxed academic atmosphere (read: least amount of time spent studying) and friendlier/more social students?

Yale. First semester, P/F, then second semester, somewhat arbitrary distribution of H/P.

Close second is Stanford.

What matters here is class size, prestige of school, and grading system.

Yale nails all three, Stanford is only a bit below Yale.

Other schools should not even be in contention.

Edit: I see that OP cares about student life, not actual quality of life. Whatever.

P/F grades for all first semester classes. Yale wins and its not even close

Y > S > H > B > ungraded legal writing > graded legal writing > Chicago just because they love law school-style S&M.

Also, Y has no legal writing class. ftw.

Top 14 means 14 schools - there are some missing from that list...

DorianGray89 wrote:Top 14 means 14 schools - there are some missing from that list...

Poll would only let me list 10 options, but I'm interested in hearing about Duke, NW, GULC, and Cornell too.

Looks like the consensus is that Yale wins by far. What about within the CCN and other groupings?

TCR is "None of the Above."

I've heard Columbia and Chicago are easy.

ajcollege wrote:TCR is "None of the Above."

I hear at GULC they give you uncurved letter grades for attending Jesuit chapel service.

ajcollege wrote:TCR is "None of the Above."

No, it's Yale.

Do you know what the grade inflation is like at NU? It's absurd. A graduating 3.9 is like top 15%. I'm sure some NU people can chime in on it. This probably won't help you at OCI but it will definitely make you stand out when talking to out of town firms or mailing.

Just go to Golden Gate and pwn the competition. Slam dunk win fo sho!

YHS > CCN > MVPBDN > C > G

aca0260 wrote:Do you know what the grade inflation is like at NU? It's absurd. A graduating 3.9 is like top 15%. I'm sure some NU people can chime in on it. This probably won't help you at OCI but it will definitely make you stand out when talking to out of town firms or mailing.

From what I've seen, the more selective firms that care about really high grades are already wise to this trick and the less selective firms don't really care as much since it's more about fit.

A school is only as hard as it's curve, correct? Wouldn't TCR be the school in which you could do the worst on the curve and still be fine? i.e. YHS

aca0260 wrote:Do you know what the grade inflation is like at NU? It's absurd. A graduating 3.9 is like top 15%. I'm sure some NU people can chime in on it. This probably won't help you at OCI but it will definitely make you stand out when talking to out of town firms or mailing.

NU does give a lot of A+'s but median is still probably 3.4 for 1L. It's 2-3L where it gets absurd. Median at gradation is around 3.65.

Yale also has a sick LRAP, so even if you flame out miserably, it's cool

Every time I read this thread I get sad that I don't go to rare based Yale.

Cooley.

Prestige of #1 with the student quality of #200. Why is this even a debate?

twentypercentmore wrote:Y > S > H > B > ungraded legal writing > graded legal writing > Chicago just because they love law school-style S&M.

Also, Y has no legal writing class. ftw.

+1

aca0260 wrote:Do you know what the grade inflation is like at NU? It's absurd. A graduating 3.9 is like top 15%. I'm sure some NU people can chime in on it. This probably won't help you at OCI but it will definitely make you stand out when talking to out of town firms or mailing.

Didn't Cornell just raise their median to 3.5 or something?

If quality of life is really important to you and stuff, maybe you shouldn't go to law school.

Tom Joad wrote:Every time I read this thread I get sad that I don't go to rare based Yale.

This.

Yale, then Harvard or Stanford. You've basically already made it if you get into one of those three schools (even if you somehow get shut out of BigLaw, you're still pretty much guaranteed to get at least some full-time non-temporary job that actually requires a JD).

Maybe I'm biased, but wouldn't Columbia or Chicago be the hardest? After all, you have the smartest/hardest-working law school students who necessarily didn't get into HYS (unless they decided to go to CCN because they got a full ride there but not at HYS). Moreover, HYS are prestigious enough that they can get away with using fail/pass/high-pass grading. At CCN, you're graded on a forced curve, and even if schools like Columbia try to claim that they don't provide GPAs, it takes an employer like 2 minutes to turn the grades on your transcript into a GPA. Once that GPA is determined, it's pretty easy to determine where a student falls within the class (i.e. top 10%, top 1/3, etc...). Word on the street is that NYU's workload is a little lighter, but a lot of the stuff stated above would still apply

Harvard's grading system seems more likely to engender gunning than Y or S. Besides that, it's a massive class, so there aren't enough clerkships/prestigious jobs to go around.