I’m sorry I don’t have any insight into the academies.
My advice on major? Study something you want to study. You may change your mind about LS. And believe me when I tell you that all kinds of people do well in LS and all kinds of others don’t do well.
Philosophy is a GREAT option because there’s a lot of logical rigor and because you have to translate a lot of it to written papers. My Philo professors were brutal on the written word. Great training for LS and many other things.
But good grief the range of backgrounds who graduated Order of the Coif in my LS class was astounding. Study what you want to study and do well. Just make sure you’re able to read and write well and quickly. Many majors will give you practice doing that. Take care of those things and LS will take care of itself. Good luck.
Is it possible that U-Dub is giving preference to those from the OOS west coast schools (such UC’s) as they are much more likely to matriculate than say, someone with similar numbers from New Jersey? In other words, its yield protection – and common sense – more than the academics?
There might be some yield protection, sure. They also have a view about the schools themselves. The way AdComs have talked about it to volunteer file reviewers like me, and in general, is that in puts the GPA in context. A 3.6 Physics major from Swarthmore is going to be understood differently than a 3.8 sociology major (not starting a fight here; I love the social sciences) from Cal State Bakersfield. That’s how it’s been explained to me and how I understand it.
Yes, they want that 3.8 for their US News ranking. But they also want that 3.6 from Swat because they have high hopes for that applicant to do well at their school and do well in the practice of law.
But this is changing three variables (GPA, major, and undergraduate school), so it looks like whoever was doing the explaining was deliberately trying to obscure how much each variable matters.
A more direct comparison would be whether same GPA, same major, different undergraduate school applicants would be viewed differently based on undergraduate school.
I don’t mean to come off snarky here; I think you’re a great poster. But you’re working too hard to look for something that’s right in front of you: someone who has worked with LS admissions at two schools (opposite coasts) and who keeps in close contact with each is simply telling you how it works and that all of these things are taken into account and thus matter.
It was just an example; we’re not writing code. I’m not sharing with anyone the specific relative weightings of the schools with which I’ve worked because that’s not my information to share. What my example was meant to demonstrate is that things beyond LSAT and GPA really count and one of those things is undergraduate school. At some LSs, it really can factor in. At others, it might only be one of several tie breakers. Depends on where they are in the pecking order.
A better example for your point would have had one different variable (undergraduate school); having three different variables weakens your statement by causing people to ask whether the other different variables were the real reason for any difference.
I agree with others here that you shouldn’t be thinking in terms of “pre-law” programs, especially if you are looking at schools at the NESCAC level. What will matter when you apply to law school is your GPA and test scores, as well as everything else you bring to the table, but not so much what you’ve been studying. You should use your time in college to explore and study what interests you, to become “smarter” in the broadest sense. Almost any major can help you enhance your writing and analytical skills. Athletics may also be a plus. I was never involved in law school admissions, but I recruited and hired a lot of associates over the years, and I learned to consider it a significant plus if a candidate had competed seriously in high school and college - athletics teaches discipline and grit, which are also things any good lawyer needs. With respect to your question about the Naval Academy, I can’t imagine that would be anything other than a plus, partly for the same reasons athletics are a plus, but also because it would add diversity to a law school class.
Thanks, but that example would be in effect a simple repetition of what I’ve already said. It would also be intellectually dishonest because LS admissions decisions are the product of human consideration of a milieu of academic data and life experience factors.
You are getting the same pushback that I have encountered on CC as to whether or not undergrad matters in LS admissions. How much of a factor is certainly open to reasonable debate, and I would argue that raw GPA is less important than relative GPA for that college, that major. But rather than rehash arguments over anecdotes or statistics that are incomplete, maybe we can take another approach and talk about process for selective positions. While I have not been involved in law school admissions, I have been deeply involved in Big Law Wall Street hiring. Thousands of law grads want to work for us. We have to make generalized decisions to cut the applicants we take time to seriously consider to a manageable number. Part of this is done by the law schools we will even visit. I covered Cali, and the only law schools we interviewed at were Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and USC. Hastings students could get an interview through Berkeley (but we applied different selection standards to them). But even within these 4 schools, our quota for callbacks offered were higher for Stanford and Berkeley. If you were in the top third, maybe top half of your class at those 2 schools, we would seriously consider you because we trusted that the law schools had already selected the best. Lesser law schools, you needed to be top 10% or better. From a process point of view, law school admissions is similar. Lots of applicants put through a funnel that narrows quickly. Some factors may be different, but the overarching goal is to assemble as strong of a class as possible filling in certain institutional “needs”. It’s hard to imagine that law schools do not use the quality and selectivity of undergrad as a filter similar to law firms.
On the question of major. Agree 100%, anything that interests you and requires lots of reading to digest quickly and requires you to write persuasively and concisely.
This is a great additional point of view on this topic because, I agree, firm recruiting is a decent proxy for LS admissions. While not quite at the pinnacle you’ve been involved with, our recruiting committee has also enjoyed the ability of culling through an applicant pool of exceedingly well qualified candidates. That is because we’re in a city that long ago became a popular destination for smart and well educated young people from elsewhere. Not NY, but still popular.
Way back when I went to a top law school, I was from Podunk U ( a state flagship but not a particularly prestigious one). Most of my classmates were from Brown, Amherst, UCLA, etc. Which anecdotally says 2 things, yes, they take people from a wide swath of undergrads, and also yes, it makes a difference the name of the school.
I started working in NY and then moved back to a top firm in a regional city. All of the young attorneys I worked with or who clerked for us were either in the top 2% or so of the 2 local law schools, or went somewhere more prestigious. I had been working there a couple of months before human resources realized no one ever asked for my transcript, so they asked me for a copy to put in my file. That would not have happened if I had gone to a different law school.
I agree with @dadof4kids and @BKSquared . I went to a T3 law school from a relatively lower-tier public college, after dropping out of a mid-tier LAC half-way through. I had an 800 on my LSAT, a good story and a boss who had graduated from the same law school and could explain why they should take me. So that kind of track is possible, and I think it’s important to make that point, but at the same time, it is true there were a lot of graduates from the top undergraduate schools in my law school class. Where you go to law school definitely does matter, at least for law firms, although which law schools are preferred depends upon the market you are hoping to practice in. If you want to start with a top NY law firm, they will typically recruit from only a small number of nationally-ranked law schools. In more regional markets, there may be a regional law school that is the “go to.” It’s hard to look so far into the future when you are still a junior in high school and have no idea even what kind of lawyer you may wish to become. In the OP’s case, the answer still seems pretty clear - any school at the NESCAC level, and any major, can be a good set-up for law school admissions. Enjoy college, get good grades, and save some money for law school.
My recommendation for any person that wants to do pre-law is to take accounting and finance classes as electives if you don’t major in those subjects. Clients don’t need writing skills from their lawyers. Most legal agreements start with boiler plates anyway. Clients need lawyers that understand the financial implications of the deals they are doing.
While I agree that many lawyers are financially and even numerically illiterate and having a basic knowledge of accounting and financial concepts would be very useful, you oversimplify the intricacies of legal drafting.
Yes, lawyers for most documents start with a basic form, could be a purchase and sale agreement, a partnership/LLC agreement, a credit agreement, a lease, a will/trust or a divorce settlement to name a few. But these agreements are negotiated with specific economic/business terms and allocations of risk which need to be accurately and unambiguously written. Parts of agreements interrelate to each other and the draftsman must make sure they work cohesively with each other. One of the biggest drafting error I see with young lawyers is they focus on one provision and in doing so create an ambiguity with another that they forgot to address. Many documents are tax or accounting treatment driven and how you choose to word the provisions may have different effects. In the field of litigation, you are trying to persuade someone (usually a judge) that the facts and laws support the outcome you want. If there is a settlement agreement, you need to write the terms clearly so that you are less likely to be back in court litigating the terms of the settlement agreement itself. Writing skills are still critical even in this age of computerized forms unless you are talking about very simple/standard terms and conditions documents which are lightly or not negotiated.
Agree entirely and you hit the two points I was going to address: the myth of the “boilerplate agreement” and the importance of strong writing skills for those in litigation who draft briefs.
Yes, financial literacy is important for most lawyers to achieve. But strong writing skills are needed by all attorneys. And, just as importantly, you need them to do well in law school.
I agree with both @BKSquared and @cquin85 . Writing is always important, whatever sort of lawyer you want to be. A corporate lawyer needs to be able to explain complex issues to clients in simple terms and needs to be able to draft with thoughtful precision so that people who weren’t around when a contract was drafted (a judge, for example) can figure out what the parties actually intended. Litigators need a somewhat different writing skill set - I am always a bit jealous because they get to use more adjectives - but writing is still critical. The advice about picking up accounting and financial skills is also spot-on. A lawyer who can read a set of financial statements and really understand them will be way ahead of the game - many law students miss this and are disinclined to study something they may regard as mundane relative to, say, constitutional law, but the joy of finding a smoking gun in a financial footnote cannot be overstated.
My point about finance and accounting was actually linked to good writing. Two further thoughts on this:
Legal writing is very different than most other kinds of writing.
Writing financial and accounting clauses into business contracts is often the most complicated part of those agreements, and where most of the mistakes are made in my experience. It is very hard to write a complicated financial structure, earn out, or a profits split if the legal team does not understand the underlying financial implications.