Top Law Schools

edit: Thanks for the help everyone!

I think you'll be fine. Yale kind of likes admitting a few students from really obscure schools each year, and your resume makes up for whatever weakness you think your school had. So long as you make your application a compelling story and have really good LORs you're fine.

Pretty sure that these days YLS automatically dings anybody who reveals they're applying with the intention of becoming a law professor (as indeed they should) so try to keep that on the down low.

Paul Campos wrote:Pretty sure that these days YLS automatically dings anybody who reveals they're applying with the intention of becoming a law professor (as indeed they should) so try to keep that on the down low.

For what it's worth, I explicitly stated in my essay that I see myself being a professor of law and was still accepted to Yale. And I was a K-JD student.

I thought the consensus was T14 schools don't really care where you went for UG. Is Y/S just an exception?

joon wrote:I thought the consensus was T14 schools don't really care where you went for UG. Is Y/S just an exception?

Just to add an anecdotal experience: I went to a state school (one that is usually highly rated for its parties) and I was told explicitly by a consulting group that my UG would pose a problem for Y, but not for H.

I ended up being accepted to Y as a median stat K-JD. So basically what I take from this is that UG can play a role at Y, but it is possible to overcome with the right application/softs.

littlepuff wrote:

Paul Campos wrote:Pretty sure that these days YLS automatically dings anybody who reveals they're applying with the intention of becoming a law professor (as indeed they should) so try to keep that on the down low.

For what it's worth, I explicitly stated in my essay that I see myself being a professor of law and was still accepted to Yale. And I was a K-JD student.

I was sort of kidding, but seriously the old model for legal academia, in which somebody went to an elite school, got top grades, clerked, worked for a big firm for a couple of years, maybe published a law review article or two, and then got a job on a law faculty, is dying.

The new model that's emerging has two tracks:

(1) J.D./Ph.D. types, i.e., pure career academics who go to law school as part of an academic track from the get-go. The people on this track who make it will get hired by elite or sub-elite law schools that are trying to be academic departments inside research universities as opposed to professional training schools. Almost all of them will continue to have little or no actual contact with or interest in the legal profession per se.

(2) People who go into law teaching after real (10+ years) legal careers. These people will get hired at lower-status schools that are more concerned with professional training than trying to be like Yale. There will be a lot more jobs in this category, because the vast majority of law schools are eventually going to have to shed their academic pretensions out of sheer fiscal necessity.

OP: If you are denied admission into Yale Law School, I doubt that it will be due to your most recent LSAT score of 174. Additionally, graduating with a 4.0 GPA from a non-prestigious undergraduate school is unlikely to harm your chances for admission especially since you have a graduate degree, have been published, have research credentials,language proficiency in multiple languages & substantial work experience. I wonder, however, if retaking the LSAT to better a 174 will cause some to think that you may become too obsessed over some matters already dealt with in a successful manner at the expense of the big picture. Seeking perfection is not necessarily a positive personality trait unless pursuing a career as an LSAT instructor. Law is not a perfect science, it is an imperfect art.

Why is Stanford a part of this? Their medians have been 172 or 171 for forever

Thanks for the reality check everyone! I will toil over every other facet of my application over the coming months and try to push the LSAT out of my mind.

Mack.Hambleton, I'm just concerned about the lack of historical data from my state and university.

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You're above every LSAT median and GPA 75th. To put it bluntly, if you get dinged anywhere, it's not going to be your LSAT that's disqualifying. You can't do anything about where you went to undergrad at this point, so spend the time and energy on putting together the right application package and hope for the best.