163/3.9 GPA Forum

[lowcountry]

deleted

[20170322]

In before "retake."

[Otunga]

If you want something as competitive as environmental law, you need to go to the very top, or at least if you want reasonable chances at environmental law. So...you've got to retake. Otherwise, you could apply and go to a good regional, but you'd have to significantly adjust your goals.

[lowcountry]

appreciate the legit reply Otunga

[jbagelboy]

Others could surely point to the clear advantages of retaking, to how those schools you mentioned (apart from UVA) don't employ a sufficiently large percentage of their graduates to justify paying to attend, to how practicing environmental law is very different from attending a few seminars and panel discussions or joining the board of a club at the school, so it's best to either get into biglaw (retake the LSAT) so you can work with an environmental litigation division (or something of that nature) or go to Yale (retake the LSAT, but even then your previous score might preclude you based on some interpretations of Asha's policy, TLS has various opinions on this) where you have some chance of securing a postgrad position with an environmental public interest organization... ect., ect., people probably aren't commenting much because most of it is old news and frankly, rehashing these arguments is exhausting.

On the neutral side, a few notes:

1) a student with 161/3.9 got into UVA last year at sticker (and attended, against significant backlash from the TLS community for not retaking).

2) Berkeley is probably the best school outside of YS for "Environmental Law", and they tend to be lenient on the LSAT (although the 25th increased this year, so maybe this trend is shifting). It's definitely worth an application, even though it's outside your region. However, since you're basically barred from the rest of the T14, it will be nearly impossible to receive a matching scholarship.