2 Apr, 2007
Choosing a Law School
Professor Alfred Yen of Concurring Opinions posts his suggestions to future law students researching a potential law school.
It is a very well written post and there are a lot of things I like about it. His first, second, fifth and sixth points are very good ones. But, speaking as a current law student to other potential law students, I have some problems with the post. More about this below...
First, as some of the commenters on the blog point out, the library in law schools are kind of pointless in today's law school environment. Almost all law school meaningful research is done through online resources. Sure, the library is a nice place to study sometimes and maybe one becomes smarter simply by being surrounded by more books, but the truth is physical libraries serve very little meaningful purpose to most modern law students. A school's library should probably be irrelevant to a future law student's decision. But that's not my biggest problem with the post.
Second, I don't think it's fair to potential students to have a pretty complete blog posting on researching potential law schools and not even mention school reputation or rankings. I realize school officials and professors often like to downplay or not even acknowledge law school rankings and the like.
But for future law students who will be spending $100k+ and wish to enter the working legal world, it's important to understand that school reputation/brand name is going to go far in terms of what kind of opportunities that student will have. And that reputation is measured, to an extent and, by rankings, flawed though they may be.
I look the post at Concurring Opinions as a very good piece of advice for a future law student who
has narrowed down his/her potential schools to a select few schools to which
he/she will pay a visit. For example, if a student applied to a dozen schools it makes little sense to visit all dozen and compare the sight lines of the classrooms. And would it be smart to choose a 4th tier school over a top 25 school because the 4th tier school has a great library and a nice building? Of course not, and I know that's not what Prof. Yen is implying.
In most cases, I suppose that some combination of school reputation/brand name/ranking, cost, scholarship offered, and location are going to play a much bigger role initially when narrowing down potentail law schools than any of the factors listed in Professor Yen's post. And maybe he felt like the factors I mentioned are so obvious that they need not be mentioned. But I think it's especially important that students understand the power of school reputation/brand name for scoring jobs after law school.
So narrow down your potential schools using the most important factors to you which, if I had to guess, is probably school reputation, location, and cost/scholarship offered. Once you've narrowed your potential law schools down to a handful, take a look at this post before you visit the school and try to get a grasp on the factors Professor Yen mentioned.