About Law Schools
To which law schools should I apply?
There are about 175 law schools in the United States which are
approved by the American Bar Association. Applications from
students at F&M find their way to more than half of them, with,
of course, drastically differing degrees of frequency in the term
of a single year. The dissimilarity among the various law schools
involves essentially prestige, emphasis, and the standard academic
distinctions in quality which one would expect. Law schools can be
divided into several useful categories: (1) the
"national" highly competitive schools; (2) public and
private "regional" schools; and, (3) "in state"
public and private schools. The first category includes schools
like California at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Georgetown,
Harvard, New York University, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Stanford
and Yale. The second and third are by far the larger groupings,
including over 150 law schools from coast to coast. The
"national," "regional," and "in
state" designations have more to do with the perceived
standing of the school relative to others than with the content of
the legal education offered. The designations also say something
about the degree to which the law schools primarily admit state
residents and the primary locations where graduates of the law
schools seek legal employment. College seniors who feel sure that
they will practice law or do other legal work in a particular state
would probably do well to attend a law school in that state or one
of the regional schools nearby. The advantage in doing so accrues
more from the networking contacts which they are likely to make
rather than from the content of the law curriculum itself. Most
college seniors are rarely so definite about plans of so specific a
nature, and thus are advised to seek out the best law school for
their particular circumstance. The Pre-Law Adviser can help in
sorting out these decisions. You are advised to be flexible and
realistic in deciding where to apply. There is simply no validity
to the widely held belief on this campus that students drop off the
edge of the earth if they venture west of Pittsburgh or south of
Washington, D.C. To assist seniors in making their applications,
the Pre-Law Adviser makes available each fall data on admissions
from the previous year's class. Of course anonymity is maintained.
Nonetheless, to the degree that one year's experience is a guide
for the next, it is helpful to know how particular law schools
reacted to various combinations of LSAT scores and grade-point
averages for students from F&M. In those cases where the
academic record and LSAT score cast considerable doubt on a
student's chances for admission to law school, the student would be
well advised to explore other contingency options in case the
student's applications are uniformly rejected. In such cases,
delayed application -- provided the intervening years are used
wisely -- may enhance one's chances for admission. Even with those
students with strong credentials for law school, it is advisable to
take at least one other test, such as the GRE, as a way of
maximizing post-Commencement options.
