Top Law Schools

This is a list of schools that granted a law degree (JD or LLM) to a current COA judge. Thought it might interest people.

Harvard 18
Yale 16
UVA 15
Georgetown 12
Michigan 9
UChicago 6
Texas 6
NYU 4
Tulane 4
UCLA 4
Berkeley 3
Emory 3
Notre Dame 3
Stanford 3
GWU 3
Arkansas 2
BU 2
BYU 2
Cornell 2
Duke 2
Florida 2
Georgia 2
IU Bloomington 2
Northwestern 2
South Carolina 2
Univ. of Akron 2
UNC 2
Univ. of Pacific 2
U Penn 2
William and Mary 2
Wyoming 2
Arizona State 1
Baylor 1
Chicago Kent 1
Colorado 1
Columbia 1
Fordham 1
Hofstra 1
Houston 1
Iowa 1
Kansas 1
Loyola New Orleans 1
LSU 1
Marquette 1
Maryland 1
Minnesota 1
Mississippi 1
Montana 1
Nebraska 1
North Dakota 1
Ohio State 1
Oklahoma 1
Penn State 1
Samford 1
Seton Hall 1
South Dakota 1
SUNY Buffalo 1
Syracuse 1
Temple 1
Villanova 1
WVU 1
WUSTL 1

Interesting. I expected Stanford to be better represented on the COA.

JOThompson wrote:Interesting. I expected Stanford to be better represented on the COA.

This is pretty interesting. I think it would be more useful if adjusted on a per capita basis. While Stanford's number would still be lower than expected, once adjusted that way it would fall into line with some of the bigger schools. They only graduate about 175 a year. This is just another metric that shows how Yale crushes everyone.

EDIT: UVa is the most impressive here, and Columbia is the least impressive (although I am sure there is some explaining factor at work here).

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TTT-LS wrote:Failing to control for student body size = methodology fail. A school that graduates 500 students each year will naturally have more alumni doing X than a peer school that graduates 200 students each year.

Also, why count LLMs in this listing?

I'm not a statistician and also didn't really feel like spending more than 45 minutes on this. I counted LLMs because I would assume a judge would still have some meaningful connection to the school if he/she got a graduate degree in law there.

What was your data source?

Anonymous Loser wrote:What was your data source?

a little site called wikipedia. so it might not be 100% accurate, but i'd wager it's better than 90%.

edit

Rand M. wrote:

JOThompson wrote:Interesting. I expected Stanford to be better represented on the COA.

This is pretty interesting. I think it would be more useful if adjusted on a per capita basis. While Stanford's number would still be lower than expected, once adjusted that way it would fall into line with some of the bigger schools. They only graduate about 175 a year. This is just another metric that shows how Yale crushes everyone.

EDIT: UVa is the most impressive here, and Columbia is the least impressive (although I am sure there is some explaining factor at work here).

If you think about it, CLS is really only going to have 2nd Circuit, while UVA dominates in the 4th Circuit and has a substantial presence in the 11th, 5th, 6th, and 3rd, as well. A lot of this can be explained by geography and national placement.

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Actually UVA was the one strange school in the sense that a lot of judges went to their T2 state school and then got an LLM from UVA. So that is probably the only misleading number on this list.

tallboone wrote:Actually UVA was the one strange school in the sense that a lot of judges went to their T2 state school and then got an LLM from UVA. So that is probably the only misleading number on this list.

That's also a great explanation; I forgot UVA has one of the biggest summer LLM programs for judges.

Great list.

One other skew I'd note: This doesn't seem to include senior judges. If you include senior judges, for example, Columbia has 3 on the 2nd Circuit (Feinberg, Sack, Lynch).

Probably doesn't change things greatly, but I thought I'd point it out. Some senior judges handle caseloads similar to the active ones.