YLS recent alum taking questions Forum

[YLSalum]

Happy new year all! Bored and with a little downtime during the holidays, so thought I'd offer to answer any questions you have - I found this forum very valuable when I was applying to law school (and also during). As a brief introduction, I'm a recent YLS grad who's currently clerking. I'd be happy to answer questions about YLS, New Haven, choosing law schools, clerking, firms, etc. In law school, I did several clinics, YLJ + specialized journals, a few other student groups, RA'd for a couple of profs, and did both public interest and big law during my summers. I also TA'd both at YLS and at the college. So happy to answer questions about any of that, or anything else.

[mylaptopisdead]

Can you please answer my question? My thread is posted in this section and is titled "fourth tier POS?"

Thank You.

[papajohns]

.

[lymenheimer]

[Loney M. Setnick]

Hi there! Thanks for offering to answer questions. Looking back now, what are some things you wish you had known before attending YLS? Do you recommend doing any prep before the fall? Thanks in advance

[YLSalum]

Hey mylaptopisdead,

Thanks for doing this.

YLS admissions is known to be a blackbox.

What do you think is the most important factor in YLS admissions? Once you have the requisite numbers, what is the "it" factor that will make one gain an edge in admissions?

Thanks.

I feel like I don't have much to add here since I've never interacted with the Admissions office apart from my acceptance phone conversation and one or two logistical things related to ASW. I would say that in general, I think YLS cares a lot about "softs," and about rounding out a well balanced class, with a mixture of people who appear inclined towards government, academia, private law, public interest, and other quasi-law-related careers (I can think of classmates who work primarily in startups, contemporary art, new media, medicine, global health, environmental policy, and emergency relief who all found value-add in a law degree). One of the nice things about YLS is that it's small and intimate, but people also are pursuing an incredibly wide range of careers in the law (and at the margins of the law), and so I think the Admissions office probably likes to identify people who will fill out various "types" of law student (or "non-law" law student, which YLS is especially good at attracting and supporting). But this is just speculation on my part. And I do think being a strong writer matters too - there's a reason only YLS has the 250, and they care a lot about it.

But yeah, overall, I think just showing you're a thoughtful, smart, engaged person who has demonstrated interests and passions (even if they aren't in the law, yet) is what's most important. You can do that across your statements, recommendation letters, resume, CV, etc. There's no one "right" way to do that, but I do think it counts.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Can you please answer my question? My thread is posted in this section and is titled "fourth tier POS?"

Thank You.

This is your only post on this forum and there doesn't appear to be a thread with that title. Don't troll.

[YLSalum]

Hi there! Thanks for offering to answer questions. Looking back now, what are some things you wish you had known before attending YLS? Do you recommend doing any prep before the fall? Thanks in advance

In terms of prep work, no. If anything, I'd say soak up non-law related stuff as much as you can now, because law school is intense and busy (wherever you go), and it's easy to lose track of your non-law related interests and hobbies. I've only recently gotten back into doing some hobbies I enjoyed before law school because there just wasn't time (and money) to do them given schoolwork, journals, clinics, other activities, etc. End of summer of 0L, pick up "Getting to Maybe," which I think is the best distilled explanation of how to succeed on a law school exam, and, I think, to approach legal questions generally. But I see no need to do that now.

In terms of looking back, I think just to appreciate more how great the experience ultimately will be even if 1L fall isn't perfect (i.e., not every 1L fall line-up is great, not every small group clicks, you inherently feel anxious and insecure about your place at YLS when you start). I think it really takes a year or so to work your way into YLS and find the places where you belong and can dedicate yourself, and just having the patience and peace of mind to know you will get there, eventually, would be a great way to approach 1L fall.

[lymenheimer]

Can you please answer my question? My thread is posted in this section and is titled "fourth tier POS?"

Thank You.

This is your only post on this forum and there doesn't appear to be a thread with that title. Don't troll.

I think he deleted his thread somehow. I remember reading it a little bit before he posted here. I don't know how this OP would be able answer his question, and maybe he is trolling, but it was there at one point.

[jetsfan1]

Hey thanks a ton for doing this... even though YLS is a (distant) dream for me I was wondering if you could talk about COAP a bit?

[PeanutsNJam]

how much pull does "I go to YLS" have with the ladies in bars

[A. Nony Mouse]

Can you please answer my question? My thread is posted in this section and is titled "fourth tier POS?"

Thank You.

This is your only post on this forum and there doesn't appear to be a thread with that title. Don't troll.

I think he deleted his thread somehow. I remember reading it a little bit before he posted here. I don't know how this OP would be able answer his question, and maybe he is trolling, but it was there at one point.

Oh, sorry, then, mylaptopisdead. Still better just to ask whatever you want to know here.

[Hand]

Sincerely hope this is a mistakengenuis alt

either way--skull and bones, tell me everything

[YLSalum]

Hey thanks a ton for doing this... even though YLS is a (distant) dream for me I was wondering if you could talk about COAP a bit?

Sure. Since I'm clerking (literally the ONLY job that COAP doesn't cover), I can't speak from firsthand experience. You can get more on the general schpiel on the website, but the basics is that it for any non-clerkship job if you make less than $50k ($60k at the time I enrolled, but they reduced it about 2 years ago) per year, all of your loans payments are covered by COAP on a 15-year-repayable timeline. If you make above $60/50k, they expect you to contribute 25% of the amount above the floor to your loans, and pay the rest. The ceiling caps out mathematically at around $90k to $100k.

In general, I view COAP as being good for three purposes:

1. Die-hard public interest people who are comfortable living on ~$50-90k for their first ten years out of law school (which is what you'd need to do to have all your loans repaid via COAP).

2. People who want to have the flexibility to do a fellowship, work in government, or other non-clerkship low-paying job for several years in the first 1-5 years out of law school (when you haven't repaid enough of your loans yourself that COAP isn't worth it).

3. Emergency fallback if you fall on hard times or unanticipatedly get a dream job that's low-paying.

For me, this view is largely a result of the fact that most YLSers settle in NYC, DC, SF, Boston, LA or Chicago after law school, and none of those cities (esp. the first three) are comfortably survivable, long-term, on COAP-eligible salaries, esp. if you want to start a family. Note also that COAP takes your spouse's salary into consideration, so getting married takes a lot of people off COAP eligibility.

Finally, you CAN cash in on COAP while clerking if you take a loan from YLS at ~7% interest to pay your loans while clerking, and as long as you do a COAP eligible job immediately after clerking, they will forgive the loan. Otherwise, you have to pay it off within a year. Since I wasn't sure what I was doing post-clerkship going in, I didn't want to risk that, so no COAP for me.

[YLSalum]

Hi all, I got a PM with some questions that I thought I'd anonymize and share the answers to with everyone - that way there's no special benefit to PMing.

1) I've heard that some classes are easier to get Hs in than others; do you happen to have a list off the top of your head? Do most people just find out from hearsay? (I definitely don't plan to take the easiest classes, but found it helpful in undergrad to know which classes were considered harder than others to set my expectations for time requirements accordingly )

More than anything, I think this is the criticism leveled at YLS externally: that the grades are meaningless, and easy to manipulate. To a certain extent, this is of course true, and by design, since opaque grades make it harder to determine exactly how accomplished a given student is. But I think this is largely overblown. In spring of 2012, the administration cracked down on blackletter exam classes, strongly encouraging professors to stick to a 1/3 H curve (which is pretty similar to HLS, SLS, and Berkeley, the three other schools I know of with H/P type grades). I'm certain not every professor follows this - on the other hand, most seem to do so.

The larger reason why I don't think it's that easy to game the system is that YLS alums also know which classes and professors are demanding and which ones are easy, so there's a certain limit to how much you can fool the audience by selecting easy classes. And this is especially true for feeders and SCOTUS; anecdotally, I know of more recent YLS SCOTUS clerks who did NOT have perfect H transcripts than those who did. On the other hand, I've known a number of students with perfect H transcripts who didn't even score an interview. So I really don't think there's much to be said for trying to game the system.

And also note - grading curve and time requirements are not equivalent. The most time consuming blackletter I took at YLS had a comparatively lax grading curve, but it was a tremendously difficult class that required a very good exam to get an H. It just happened to be a class with a lot of very talented students who worked their butts off.

2) Someone on this site once wrote, "there are roughly 5-7 professors that sort of control the keys to the kingdom with the fanciest clerkships" and "several of the most valuable mentors are women who explicitly try to put deserving women in the best clerkships." What was your experience with mentors? And how did you go about finding one? Do you have any recommendations for certain faculty in particular?

I think it's certainly true that, just as there are feeder judges, there are "feeder professors." It's not hard to figure out who those people are, and I think a lot of students try to aim for them. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. The most in demand professors have lots of students to pick from for RAs, seminars, etc., and when they're used to seeing brilliant work, they will expect the same. I also know friends who DID NOT have those professors as recommenders but nonetheless ended up with great clerkships, etc. I think the best way to go about finding mentors is to seek out professors who share your interests, be genuinely interested in their work, and be patient. You will not click with every faculty member, nor they with you. To some degree, you can't force chemistry, nor should you want to. And I think many of them see through suck-ups. (But that said, I think many faculty are content to work with obvious suck-ups/gunners to the degree the students are genuinely talented - talent goes pretty far at YLS even when it's not in the nicest package (to quote Kanye, the prettiest people do the ugliest things...).)

All of that said, my sense is that professor mentors are a much more substantial part of YLS than its peer schools, so don't underestimate the value of getting to know and work with faculty. As you will see from my answer to question 8, below, I think this is the best advice anyway.

3) What do you think makes someone a good law student? What has worked for you? Any particular advice for STEM-type majors?

I can only provide an N of 1, but my sense from firsthand experience, observing my classmates, and now as a clerk, is that a good law student recognizes ambiguity, can play devil's advocate with multiple sides of an argument, knows how to deploy good arguments and acknowledge (but distinguish) bad ones, and understand how altering criteria/priorities/first principles can yield different preferred or dispositive outcomes. The hardest exam questions were the ones that had no "right" answer, or ones that asked you to provide multiple arguments and explain why each was comparatively more or less persuasive.

Anecdotally, I think STEM folks sometimes have a harder time transitioning to law school because they are used to clearly "right" answers and clearly "wrong" answers. Obviously, the law has plenty of those, too. But the interesting parts of the law less so: originalism and living constitutionalism each have compelling merits, and how you fall between them is as much the result of other judicial values or first principles as it is those arguments alone. The same goes for textualism vs. functionalism, formalism vs. legal realism, etc. I may be a "judicial moderate," but I think there are few burning questions in the law with straightforward and obvious answers, I think there's a lot to learn and consider from each of the major approaches to law and legal interpretation.

To that end, I'd strongly recommend getting "Getting to Maybe" at the end of your 0L summer. I think it's the most concise explanation of how to approach exam problems from this perspective. Understanding the importance of, and how to, show your work, and identifying the gray areas of a problem, are not only critical to acing law school exams, but to being a good law student (and lawyer) in general.

4) Which clinics / specialized journals did you do, and how was your experience with each? (Relatedly, is there anything you can do to prepare to apply for YLJ?)

I did two clinics, one client-centered and one non-client-centered. I enjoyed both, for different reasons. The client-centered clinic was incredibly intense, both because you are responsible for someone's serious life issues -- and that is a totally different kind of pressure than exams, making it on YLJ, etc. -- and also because their life issues often involve real-life trauma. But it was really empowering to learn how to be a real lawyer, take responsibility, and rise to the occasion. In many ways it was the most meaningful thing I did at YLS. The non-client-centered clinic was a much less exacting time commitment, but a lot more "fun." It was more intellectually interesting, with time to enjoy my peers and strategize about novel legal arguments. I would recommend everyone try to have both experiences if they can. The beauty of YLS is that it's really not that hard to have both kinds of clinical experiences over three years, and the clinical experiences at YLS are one of the strongest arguments for the school. I wish the Administration shared that view as much as my peers and I do...

As for journals, I did two specialized journals my 1L year and dropped both when I got on YLJ because that was enough of a time commitment, and I had a very time-consuming position on YLJ as a Second Year Editor, so YLJ already took over my life during spring 2L/fall 3L. I really enjoyed YLJ, but I recommend it more for people who enjoy academic scholarship and like to get ticky-tacky about legal arguments, sources materials, citations, and methods of proof. I also think everyone should sit the Bluebook exam 1L spring, because it's the only way you will ever force yourself to learn the Bluebook. However, I would NOT recommend getting super involved in YLJ for people who are more practitioner-oriented, as it is just NOT a good use of time compared to representing clients, getting more practical skills, etc. And I think its value for (non-Supreme Court) clerkships is overrated, which brings me to...

5) What did the clerkship application timeline look for you? I've read anything from starting end of 1L to a few years out...?

When I was applying, The Plan still existed, so my timeline is basically irrelevant to you. These days, my sense is that a number of circuit judges (and esp. a number of "feeder" judges) hire over 1L summer, and the rest hire early 2L spring (i.e. a few weeks from now) once 2L fall grades have come out. The latter approach is how my judge this year is approaching it, albeit for 1 year out of law school.

And yes, you can DEFINITELY get a clerkship after 2L fall - it just won't be for right after law school. Then again, that's already true for many people, as judges seem to be hiring farther and farther out. I would worry less about getting a clerkship as soon as possible as about finding a judge that is a good fit for you. Clerkships are like apprenticeships, and my entire life is organized according to my judge's preferences. To that end, I'm incredibly lucky and thankful that I enjoy my judge's company and respect my judge so tremendously that I'm content to be a lemming for a year! But don't underestimate how much your experience will hinge entirely on your judge (and your co-clerks).

6) What do you think made you most successful in obtaining a clerkship? Is there anything you would have done differently?

I think success in landing a clerkship is some combination of grades, resume (including pre-law school), recommendations, connections and network, interview abilities, and the always-mystical "fit." Some of these things you can control more than others. Especially if you are conservative, connections and networking seem to matter more, as many conservative judges hire via the Fed Soc network and that can be an effective pre-requisite to certain judges. Liberals have no such equivalent mass conspiracy.

In my case, it was some combination of grades, resume, recommendations, and fit. I don't think you should underestimate how much grades lead to recommendations, however. I am 100% certain I got my clerkship as a result of doing very well in several blackletter classes. Precisely because YLS grades are an opaque morass, judges are very eager to hear from professors who can say "this student was in the top X% of my VERY HARD blackletter class full of Rhodes Scholars and Ph.D.s." (And I am not even making that sentence up - I read it in the recommendation letter from a professor at YLS for a student who applied to my judge.)

7) What are your suggestions for making the most of 1L fall since grades aren't a factor? (Besides spending lots of time socializing with classmates )

In retrospect, I wish I had taken my first semester classes a bit more seriously, at least as an intellectual matter. Not so much from the standpoint of exams, but just soaking in the material more. I had a lackluster approach since I knew they were all pass-fail and I didn't love some of the subjects. On the other side of law school, I now would like to be proficient in every area of law, and so when I took the Bar I really had to re-teach myself some of the 1L fall classes. And there was a lot of time to soak it all in and think about how the different areas of the law connect together (or don't). After 1L fall, everything becomes a blurry haze of juggling obligations until you pop out the other side 3L spring and graduate. So just enjoy that period of time, as it's the most purely intellectual time you will have at YLS.

But yes, socialize with classmates should always be the number one priority! That's really the best part of YLS anyway... I feel so privileged to have been part of such a tremendously talented, thoughtful, and engaged community.

Finally, what was your favorite part about YLS (other than the students and the employment prospects)?

Other than the students, for me it was the professors. I respect so many of them so much, and for being so incredibly accomplished, they devote an incredible amount of time to their students. There are a few who are among the smartest people I've ever seen speak in my life, and I feel like my brain got a little bit faster/sharper just by getting to spend time listening to them. Of course, some are conceited jerks, and I think I got really lucky to get to spend time with so many of the great ones, but that place is just full of really smart, thoughtful, engaged people.

Hope these answers help!

[jetsfan1]

Hey thanks a ton for doing this... even though YLS is a (distant) dream for me I was wondering if you could talk about COAP a bit?

Sure. Since I'm clerking (literally the ONLY job that COAP doesn't cover), I can't speak from firsthand experience. You can get more on the general schpiel on the website, but the basics is that it for any non-clerkship job if you make less than $50k ($60k at the time I enrolled, but they reduced it about 2 years ago) per year, all of your loans payments are covered by COAP on a 15-year-repayable timeline. If you make above $60/50k, they expect you to contribute 25% of the amount above the floor to your loans, and pay the rest. The ceiling caps out mathematically at around $90k to $100k.

In general, I view COAP as being good for three purposes:

1. Die-hard public interest people who are comfortable living on ~$50-90k for their first ten years out of law school (which is what you'd need to do to have all your loans repaid via COAP).

2. People who want to have the flexibility to do a fellowship, work in government, or other non-clerkship low-paying job for several years in the first 1-5 years out of law school (when you haven't repaid enough of your loans yourself that COAP isn't worth it).

3. Emergency fallback if you fall on hard times or unanticipatedly get a dream job that's low-paying.

For me, this view is largely a result of the fact that most YLSers settle in NYC, DC, SF, Boston, LA or Chicago after law school, and none of those cities (esp. the first three) are comfortably survivable, long-term, on COAP-eligible salaries, esp. if you want to start a family. Note also that COAP takes your spouse's salary into consideration, so getting married takes a lot of people off COAP eligibility.

Finally, you CAN cash in on COAP while clerking if you take a loan from YLS at ~7% interest to pay your loans while clerking, and as long as you do a COAP eligible job immediately after clerking, they will forgive the loan. Otherwise, you have to pay it off within a year. Since I wasn't sure what I was doing post-clerkship going in, I didn't want to risk that, so no COAP for me.

Thanks for this (very comprehensive) response. Any reason why COAP wouldn't cover clerkships? Seems like that is exactly the type of career path it should cover... Also when you say they will "forgive" the loan do you completely forgive or is it added to the COAP eligible debt? Thanks again for doing this and let's not let this thread die

[YLSalum]

Thanks for this (very comprehensive) response. Any reason why COAP wouldn't cover clerkships? Seems like that is exactly the type of career path it should cover... Also when you say they will "forgive" the loan do you completely forgive or is it added to the COAP eligible debt? Thanks again for doing this and let's not let this thread die

I'm not sure there's been an official justification, but I presume the answer is that COAP would go under, because approx. 1/2 the school clerks at least once, and many people clerk multiple times, so they probably couldn't afford to provide it at the current level if they included clerkships. And I think they'd justify that on the basis that most people go to jobs with clerkship bonuses afterwards (usually $50k for one clerkship, $70k for two clerkships), so in the long run it works out.

As to the forgiveness of the COAP loan, my understand was that they just forgave it outright, not added to COAP debt. But you'd have to confirm that with the financial aid office.

Glad it's helpful - feel free to ask anything else!

[YLSalum]

Bumping in case there's any more interest now that there are likely more admits!