Top Law Schools

Pick one and leave a why response

And this is considering all other significant factors are equal (undergrad pedigree, major, connections, background, access)

I think you need another category, which is who in the world knows.

LSAT + GPA is your best predictor of law school grades, and the admissions index figures (which combine LSAT/GPA) for these folks are pretty close. I ran them through two school's formulas, one LSAT heavy (Columbia) and one GPA heavy (Stanford). Here's the range of index scores:

Columbia: 4.2-4.28; 4.26 median
SLS: 3.28-3.46; 3.47 median

I don't think there is one category here that will lead to the best law student. Law school exams are a pretty random skill and unlike anything any 1L has ever done. Some people are just naturally better at them and I don't think there is anything about that group of people that you can bring down to LSAT/GPA numbers, especially at a T14 where everyone is intelligent.

If I had to pick a category, it's probably the people with low GPAs in undergrad and high LSAT scores, with the two huge caveats that they had low GPAs in undergrad because they didn't try very hard and they have high LSAT scores without much studying. If that person puts in an equivalent amount of effort in law school, they likely do better than the 4.0/168 who busted their ass for both of those numbers. There are a lot of assumptions in this scenario though that make it unlikely to hold across any sort of population or sample size. Law school grades are just too difficult to predict.