<p>After some even more searching I’ve learned that apparently USNews rankings are a bunch of bull and that many rankings are wrong. One of the biggest things that changes is that UChicago is better than stanford.</p>
<p>Is this true?</p>
<p>No. UChicago has a great law school, but Stanford Law is up there with Harvard and Yale Law.</p>
<p>To be clear, I’m talking about professional opinion not USNews opinion which I have found to have a lot of flaws.</p>
<p>Uchicago has had more supreme court clerks than stanford.</p>
<p>I was wondering if any lawyers would know?</p>
<p>once you’re at that level (top 10 law schools), the differences are miniscule and mostly based on luck. Probably if you want to work in the west, stanford has more alum. connections. but you’d be able to get good firm or government jobs and be a strong candidate for fellowships and clerkships if you had good grades from either school.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t understand your question. Who says UChicago is better than Stanford? Leiter? </p>
<p>IMO, the # of SCOTUS clerks isn’t really a great measure of the quality of a law school. Among the many reasons why they are not is that appointments are NOT based solely on merit; political views are usually part of the process. Conservative justices usually hire politically conservative clerks who previously worked for a circuit court judge of similar views to the associate justice doing the hiring. Right now, a law student probably has a better chance of being hired as a SCOTUS clerk if the law student is politically conservative. There are just a lot more liberal students in top law schools and thus more people are vying to work for liberal justices.</p>
<p>Are you talking about new hires? I know that Alioto has hired clerks who are not recent grads; they have lots of years of legal experience. I seem to recall one of them is a UChicago grad who worked for Justice for a lot of years. There was a lot of commentary about the appointment because it was seen as politicizing the selection process even more than it is already politicized. </p>
<p>Even those who think the # of SCOTUS clerkships matters usually adjust by size. I don’t know the exact sizes, but I think the typical UChicago class is much larger than Stanford’s. Harvard’s class size is almost 3X as large as Yale’s. So, comparing absolute #s of clerks is sort of silly, IMO–even for those who think the #s mean something. </p>
<p>In any event, while UChicago is a fine law school, it is generally seen as part of CCN–Chicago, Columbia, NYU–the group of schools which ranks just below the “trinity”–Yale, Harvard, Stanford. </p>
<p>I respectfully disagree with Stacy’s comment that the differences between the top 10 law schools are miniscule. IMO, they are not. There is a substantial difference between the kind of job someone in the middle of the class at Harvard Law can get vs. the kind of job someone in the middle of the class at Northwestern or Cornell can get.</p>
<p>Yeah, I got the info from Leiter.</p>
<p>Yale = 200
Harvard =550
UChicago = 200
Stanford = 200</p>
<p>So they are about the same size. </p>
<p>Leiter’s “rankings” also show UChicago as having a better faculty; its referenced much more and produces more articles than even harvard and Yale, which I find interesting. I’m not sure if that means anything. It also gets good marks for the quality of the teaching. It also shows Uchicago students as having better national job placement than Stanford. I’m not sure what these numbers mean but they are sure impressive.</p>
<p>I’m trying to read up on the articles top law professors at each school has written to get at an idea of the law profs I really want to work with if I get in.</p>
<p>I have a feeling you’re right about the conservatism. UChicago is very conservative and has a very conservative, top economics program as well, which may be the reason it has a lot of clerks.</p>
<p>Is Leiter on the mark or should I be looking elsewhere?</p>
<p>While not as important as undergrad, consider what you want to do with your law degree. If you want to clerk for a Supreme Court justice, I would highly suggest going to the schools that funnel students that way. Jonri makes some excellent points about conservatism (there’s also some fantastic networking for conservative law students); however, I think he missed the basic point that two giants of the federal judiciary, Posner and Easterbrook, are both affiliated with Chicago. i will guess that there is some element of funneling conservative students to highly-ranked federal judges who are also conservative, then having those grads work their way up to a SJC clerkship. </p>
<p>I would be interested to know the number of judges that each school produces; if you are willing to clerk your way up, you can start with an alum of your school and continue to clerk (or clerk, work, and clerk again) until you get the ultimate brass ring.</p>
<p>Again - and sorry to harp on this - but check out the back of US News. It will tell you the percentage of graduates of each school who end up clerking for judges. At some schools, the number is as high as 30%. Some schools, such as Northwestern and Penn, are more business focused and, although “better” academically, just don’t get those numbers. </p>
<p>While I will never disagee that Yale will take you further than Cornell, do consider what you want to do with your law degree and, if there is a sufficient difference and you are targeting a very specific area of the law, consider a school which best meets those particular needs.</p>
<p>Definitely, but I’ve been trying to get a more accurate idea of the quality of the programs and specialties I want to get into and I’m a bit suspicious of USNews rankings.</p>
<p>I am pretty conservative and was interested in finding out more specific information about the composition of each school’s faculty and their jobs after graduation. I would like to clerk, and had my sights set on Harvard, Columbia and Duke since USNews said they had the % number of law clerks. But that doesn’t really tell one anything about the political composition of those clearking or where they go. </p>
<p>I would imagine Yale clerks would be pretty much extremely liberal along with most Harvard clerks. I would also imagine that places with high placement like Duke might be more likely to clerk regionally or for state courts, which is not particularly what I want to do.</p>
<p>But it seems that not only does Chicago has a higher number of SC clerks than Columbia and Duke by far–and by extrapolation probably more people clerking for those positions (federal district) that are the penultimate step to clerking on the supreme court–but also a pretty conservative faculty as wel. Also it seems to have the best law and economics program (more so than Yale even) according to Leiter which is my interest at the moment.</p>
<p>I’m just asking if Leiter’s rankings are more reliable than USNews generally.</p>
<p>Don’t worry too much about the school’s faculty. If the students are liberal, or if the conservatives are apathetic, it won’t matter too much if the faculty is conservative. </p>
<p>I would certainly have loved to go to a school with more conservative faculty - just to get something resembling both sides of the debate - but am very happy with the strong conservative student groups here. It is really great to go to conferences and symposia and know that we have such a strong representation among our student body - we’re there in full force. You’ll find a lot of networking at such events.</p>