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Thursday, October 06, 2005
Come on, Eduardo!
Eduardo Penalver, a professor at Fordham (visiting at Yale) writes:
Teaching at Fordham Law School, I’ve met students who are every bit as capable as my classmates at Yale. They just didn’t want to leave New York City, so many of them never applied to law schools beyond the city limits.
Teaching at Hastings, I too have met students who are every bit as capable as many of my Yale classmates were. But I think it is a bit absurd to suggest that these students simply didn't feel like leaving San Francisco. This rationale may be true for one or two people, but there is no shame in acknowledging that high LSATs and high GPAs don't always select for the best law students. Just as these Fordham students could have gone to NYU or Columbia if they had done better on their LSATs or had better GPAs in college (within their city limits, to boot), so too could my students have gone to Stanford or Berkeley (slightly outside their city limits) if they had done better on the registers relevant for law school admissions.
I suppose in the final analysis Eduardo and I agree: snobbery about SMU is uncalled for.
Posted by Ethan Leib on October 6, 2005 at 08:01 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink
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Comments
And in the end the mettle it takes to be a practicing attorney (the point of the legal education!) is different than the skills to be a good applicant to LS or a good law student. Look at some of the best attorneys and you see time and time again that they went to Tier 3 or 4 schools. In the end, this amounts to much mental masturbation not worthy of our time or minds. ~ $.02
Posted by: RealityBites | Mar 14, 2008 12:49:20 PM
Yes, Eduardo. The point in my post was to agree with you--but with what I take to be a stronger argument: students at some of these "second-tier" schools are as good or better than many students at "first-tier" schools IRRESPECTIVE OF THE REASON THEY ENDED UP AT THE SECOND-TIER PLACE. You were focusing on why some students forego better schools; I am focusing on the reality that even students who would never have the chance to forego those better schools make superior law students.
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Oct 16, 2005 9:54:53 PM
Actually, Ethan, there's more to my answer than just anecdotes. You have to agree that if someone chooses to apply only to NYC law schools, their chances of being admitted to an elite law school (say, top-10) drop considerably. That's true, I think, even if you assume that they have credentials that would, all things considered, qualify them for admission to one of those schools. (I'm assuming, of course that admissions processes are somewhat imperfect and inconsistent, so that someone who is admitted to Yale and Columbia might be rejected by Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford.)
And I don't think the cherry picking a few anecdotes really defeats my point. I was arguing against those who seem to view an SMU degree as somehow disqualifying (see Ann Coulter). As long as there are a handful of exceptional students at lower ranked schools, my point remains valid, I think.
Posted by: Eduardo Penalver | Oct 16, 2005 4:59:55 PM
John,
Do you suppose it's especially liberals that love to say they are from Harvard or Yale, or that this is in fact pretty common to people who went there regardless of their political views? I'd expect the later. And while I think lots of people perfectly able to do top work come from lots of different schools, is it at all unusual that those who do well in some field like to mention it? I don't see this as illiberal at all. (I'm reminded of a reporter who once asked Don Larson if he ever got tired of talking about his perfect game in the world series. Larson responded by saying something like, "No, of course not. Why would I"? That seemed about right to me.) My points, though, are that the idea that liberals are especially snobby about their acheivements (especially intelectual ones) seems pretty dubious to me, and secondly that feeling quite proud of one's intelectual achievments is really not at all similar to being racist or sexist.
Posted by: Matt | Oct 7, 2005 4:51:59 PM
Some of us at Hastings were in majors where A's are given out rarely, and on a curve -- at Berkeley (my undergrad school) in the science departments, my 3.3 was a great GPA. In the History department, though, it would have been mediocre at best.
So yeah -- I was at a distinct disadvantage in applying to law schools, because my GPA couldn't compete, even though within my major, I was in the same percentile rank as a poli sci major with a 3.85....
Numbers don't tell the whole story, and they definitely give us scientists short shrift.
Posted by: anon | Oct 7, 2005 3:07:05 PM
I met a lot of students at Pepperdine who got into much higher-ranked schools. I got into Illinois, and I didn't apply widely (since Pepperdine, low-ranked that it might be, was my first choice). My wife (who I met at Pepperdine) got into several higher-ranked schools, including at least one top ten school. So when it comes to religious schools, or schools known for something "special" (with Pepperdine, its conservatism and ocean-front property), it's hard to stereotype its students. I'm sure that there are a lot of students at USD with great grades and LSATs who figured, "Law school anywhere will suck. It might as well suck at the beach."
Posted by: Mike | Oct 7, 2005 2:27:06 PM
I know the original post is about SMU, but it seems to me that the Miers's situation speaks to
an interesting paradox. Liberals deny themselves, at least formally, all sorts of biases and prejudices. They abhor racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, you name it. But there is still that last province of snobbish indulgence which they can't quite seem to let go--intellectual achievement and talent, especially with regard to schools. Liberals love to say that they're from Harvard or Yale but they don't love to say that they've held occassionally racist views or made the casual sexist joke or thought less of the guy who mows their lawn.
Sure, you can point to, say, a certain lefty law prof at Harvard Law who has said that he would favor trading jobs with the janitor because intellectual "merit" is so ambiguous, anyway. But the same professor is able to make this "radical" suggestion precisely because he has attained an elite education at exclusive schools--that is, precisely because he doesn't occupy the janitor's position and instead has acquired the epistemic authority to say such silly things. The radical suggestion (did the professor ever take up his own offer?) merely reiterates the vast intellectual divide, and serves inadvertently as an embarrassingly indulgent attempt to publicy assert his moral indignity at class inequality.
I think the Miers's nomination is a tricky one for liberals. The conversatives have paradoxically marshalled liberal themes in her support: educational diversity on the bench and an anti-elitist attitude toward education. Mentioning SMU doesn't seem especially smart; everyone knows it's there and what it means. What's important, I think, is to clarify, one way or the other, how her job experiences stack up with her candidacy. That's not because SMU isn't a relevant issue, but for political reasons, it should be avoided for the liberals.
Posted by: John Kang | Oct 7, 2005 2:16:06 PM
I'm surprised that people are only talking about the fact that Miers went to SMU, and not how she did there. It's not as though the only information we have about a law student is where they went to school. I suspect there are a lot of students at Fordham who are better than Yalies, but that should be reflected in their grades, whether they made law review, what their profs thought of them, etc., right? Admittedly, this evidence is not perfect, but it at least gives some indication of quality.
Two suspicions: First, Miers must have done pretty well in law school because she snagged a federal clerkship despite coming out of a lower-tier school. And second, I suspect that this might come out in the hearings or perhaps through the blogosphere as people continue to investigate her.
Posted by: Dave | Oct 7, 2005 12:46:35 PM
If people like Eduardo really feel this way, it'd be nice if they back these feelings up with something tangible ... like actually hiring non-Yale grads for law prof positions or nifty clerkships ...
Posted by: Jeff V. | Oct 7, 2005 9:56:03 AM
For the record, here's Eduardo's reply to Kaimi on his blog (where Kaimi more or less made the point I made):
"I actually know of students who have chosen Fordham over Harvard. And some people who have parents who attended Fordham or who went to Fordham college or who value attending a Catholic institution and therefore apply to Fordham but not Columbia or NYU. You’re also not considering all the students who want to attend evening school and therefore don’t have the option of applying to NYU and Columbia. It doesn’t make sense to someone like you — who has apparently fully bought into the hierarchical ideology of the legal profession — that people would, say, value being at a Catholic school or keeping their day job, but I promise you that it does happen. In addition, not every student who can get into Yale or Harvard (or any number of top 15 schools) will get into Columbia or NYU. You’re assuming a rationality to the admissions process that simply is not born out by the reality. It’s just not the case that every Yale student is superior to every Columbia student, or that every Columbia student is better than every Fordham student."
This is good as far as it goes. But no one was suggesting that it was impossible to cherry-pick a few bits of anectodal evidence to find students who turned down better schools for geographical (or religious!) reasons. Indeed, if anti-elitism is the point of this discussion, I think it is more important to point out that the Fordhams of the world have not only the one or two people that turn down Harvard to go there for one reason or another but they also have many students who--despite not having the credentials (or the money) to get into Harvard--will be much better law students than most of the class at Harvard.
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Oct 7, 2005 12:54:09 AM
It wouldn't hurt to note that some of those students at lesser law schools do have high LSATs or do have great undergrad GPAs. What they very rarely have is both.
Trust me--I had a 173 LSAT at a 3rd tier state school, because I had a 2.5 GPA from a second tier state school.
Posted by: anon | Oct 7, 2005 12:37:40 AM
I think your point is a fair one: even if LSATs and GPAs were very strong predictors, they are not perfect predictors. One question one could also ask profitably is why students might attend a particular school that is lower down the usual rankings than they could attend. Here, geographical preferences do play a part; so, often relatedly, do family obligations (ie., the student's spouse's job, or a parent who requires care, or a kid in school). So do financial considerations: one school may offer a full ride and a higher-ranked school likely will not. There are also students who want a particular kind of education, either in the sense that they want to go to a school with a strong faculty in some specialty, or a school with strong ties to local employers, or a school that's more teaching-oriented and less-research oriented.
A final important factor is informational asymmetry; it's not true that -everyone- understands the difference between Yale and Fordham, and someone considering offers from both schools might therefore be less aware of the advantages (if any) that might follow from attending Yale over Fordham. I have had some extraordinarily bright students who discovered only too late that if they want to teach they would have been better off attending one of the usual suspect schools -- in part because, whether because they are the first in their family to attend college and/or law school or for other reasons, they are not drawing on the same social and informational capital as some of their classmates. These informational asymmetries, and other class issues to which they may often relate, may continue to have a differential impact on students through law school and into the clerkship, law firm, and teaching markets.
In short, those of us who have taught at a range of schools know that the top range, at least, of students in our classes can be as high at those schools as at any school, including our alma maters (although that is not necessarily true of students below the top range), and should be tireless in reminding the less well-informed, more insulated members of the bar or academy that they are mistaken to look down their noses at the top graduates of any school. (How these individuals perform after that point is a different, although sometimes related, question.)
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Oct 6, 2005 9:07:25 PM
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