Strategies for Women Applying to Law School

Women applying to law school are in a rare position of competitive advantage. Women go to college in greater numbers than men do. Over half the college students today are women. What's more, women do better at college than men do. So (big surprise) women graduate from college in greater numbers than men do.

Women also have the competitive advantage of having higher grades. Women who applied to start law school in the fall of 1995 had an undergraduate grade point average of 3.15, compared to men's 3.06. They outperformed men in 1994 and 1993, too. Women got better grades than men subject by subject, so we're not talking about women studying basket weaving and men nuclear engineering. Not only that, but women applied to law schools substantially beyond their reach, based on their grades and test scores, and women were accepted to law schools where they could not have been predicted to be accepted!


That's the good news. On the other side, however, even though more women than men graduate from college, more men apply to law school. A lot more. In 1995, 54 percent of law school applicants were men, and 46 percent were women. The underrepresentation of women in the applicant pool is puzzling. One of the purposes of this article series is to remove some of the fear and mystery from law school, so that women who would genuinely benefit from a legal education will be encouraged to apply.

Moreover, women are admitted to law schools at a slightly lower rate than men are, so that the 46 percent female applicant group in 1995 produced law school classes only 44 percent female. In 1997, the entering class went up to 46 percent female, so the increased number of female applicants has increased the integration of American law schools more quickly recently. A study showed that women are accepted at more selective law schools than they "deserve" based on their grades. But regardless of why women haven't crossed the 50 percent mark, as they have, for instance, in medical school enrollment, many women report that they do not feel empowered by their 40-something percent presence in law school. We will explore whether this is because under 50 percent means you are a minority regardless of how large or whether there are other, less easily measured, explanations.

Why don't more college women apply to law school? The answer is a mystery, especially since a nationwide survey of college freshmen consistently reveals that a lot of women college students aspire to go to law school when they start out. All the press about how nasty it is can't help. In the late 1970s, just as women began graduating from American colleges and universities in numbers equal to male rates, the book, movie, and TV show The Paper Chase appeared, starring the overbearing Professor Kingsfield, and telling the story of the terrible experiences law students have, especially with the first year. When the moment comes to decide, The Paper Chase picture of law school is suddenly more than just a funny story.

Also, the stories about how women don't do as well on the Law School Admission Test may be discouraging some. As we have seen, Claude Steele's "stereotype threat" predicts that people who are stereotyped as underachievers underachieve, not because they're dumber, but because they lack self-confidence Lacking self-confidence, they may not even try to take the test. If you're out there thinking you won't try for law school because you might not do well on the LSAT, stop thinking that way.

Women may see law school as a bad financial investment. Many law students borrow some or all of the money it costs to go to law school. All surveys of lawyers' earnings show that men lawyers earn quite a bit more than women do. Law schools don't charge women lower tuition, however, so law school looks like a better investment for men than for women. A couple of the women spoke quite straightforwardly about the economic reasons for their decisions, for instance, to go to Northwestern, which offered them big scholarships, rather than Harvard, which did not.

Finally, consider a recent survey of college students at the very tony Williams College. This study turned up the interesting statistic that Williams women expect to marry (91 percent) and have two or more children. When they have their two children, they expect to reduce their working hours outside the home to twenty-two hours per week. Although many firms tout their flexible-time and part-time options, as the Princeton Review's prelaw guide put it: "Flexible Work Arrangements are a lot like New Year's Resolutions. Everyone makes them but no one ever does anything about them." Law firms make their money by billing clients for lawyers' time, so you can imagine how popular part-timers are with the people who make the promotion decisions. By contrast, the male students at Williams College did not expect to reduce their hours. Even the women only hoped their guys would cut back about three hours a week, while they themselves would spend eighteen weekly hours in the nursery. People who expect to spend a substantial part of their adult life in unpaid child care positions are understandably hesitant about investing in their own higher education.

That decision is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't get further education, you will likely earn less than the baby's father even before the baby comes, so it will look reasonable for you to be the one to stay home. If you stay home, study after study has shown that your lifetime earnings never catch up, and your pension won't be worth much. Almost 50 percent of marriages in America end in divorce. If you're really unlucky, you'll end up old and poor. Maybe those Williams College girls should think again.

Fear of humiliation, fear of financial loss, expectations of being able to rely on a male breadwinner. These are not good reasons for you high-scoring female college graduates to pass on law school. This article series is going to help you do well on the LSAT and pick a law school that does not have a reputation for humiliating women. Although it is a sad truth that women lawyers make less money than male lawyers do, short of a sex change, you can't become a male lawyer. Your choice is between the quite good living the profession offers and the best job you can get with skills that cost less to acquire than a law degree. We've already seen how superior law is to making a living as a sociology major. If you can make it in business school, God bless. Otherwise . . . you go, girl.

All the guidebooks tell you to get an early start. They're right. Almost all law schools send out applications for the upcoming year in August, about a year before admission. That's way too late! You should start the process at least as early as one and one half years before the earliest possible admission. This would be very early December of your junior year in college, if you're planning to go directly to law school from college. Get on-line or call the Law School Admission Council for the materials and the Official Guide to Law Schools.

You will need your Christmas vacation to use the prep books to start cramming for the admission test. You'll need your spring semester to take courses that reflect commitment to a course of study or that will yield good marks to show an upward trend in grades or, hopefully, both. You can use the summer between junior and senior years to fatten up your work resume in ways we will explore in this article and do something for important recommenders as well as do the specific work for the autumn LSAT. Some people take the LSAT as early as June, which pushes all the dates back. Most law schools use rolling admissions, taking promising applications as they come in after a start date around October. The class looks a lot emptier to admissions officers in October than it does in January. When would you like to have your application reviewed?

What They Really Do with Your Application

The application consists of four important parts: (1) the index number, which is composed of your undergraduate grade point average and your LSAT score, (2) your formal life story, including work history, (3) your essay, and (4) your references. Some law schools have an interview procedure that may generate a fifth column in your application, and some even still allow local alumni to do the interview work.

Law schools have different ways of administering the admissions process-some, including a big state institution whose admissions director talked to me with admirable frankness, have a process to sort the applications strictly by the index number, eliminating the candidates whose number is hopelessly below the law school's standards and accepting candidates whose number is well within the law school's ambitious aspirations for itself.

At state institutions, this sorting is done commonly by an administrator, because so little judgment is involved, and frequently this sorting eliminates or accepts as many as half the applicants. When the pile is reduced to the applicants in the gray area, occasionally accompanied by a file that eludes summary determination because of very unusual characteristics pro or con, the process is often taken up by an admissions committee that includes faculty as well as staff. Some committees even include a student or two. (Some other schools, however, assign the dean of admissions, rarely a faculty member, and their staff to do the whole job.) The committee divides the files, sometimes assigning them to an individual member, sometimes expecting each file to be read by more than one member, but usually expecting each member to dispose of scores of them each month, up or down. Only the files that an individual or subcommittee can't decide about come to the full committee.

At other schools, all the applications are divided between the administrators and committee members, and each file is expected to be read in its totality, not just categorized on the index number first. This variant of the admissions procedure has been dwindling in response to the large number of applications since the law school boom in the 1970s. In those schools that still look at everyone's whole application, or in determining the fate of the marginal applicants, admissions officials generally report that other factors, such as the selectiveness of the undergraduate institution or the degree of grade inflation they can sniff out, as well as the life story, essays, interview, and recommendations, weigh in.

Quick and Dirty Way to Get into Law School

Because most sorting at a lot of schools is done at the beginning, index phase of the process, the fastest way to get into law school is to have really good undergraduate grades and make a high score on the standardized Law School Admission Test (LSAT), or at least to do so well that if you add them both up, you get a high index number. If you have a high index number, you will most likely be put in the desirable category of "presumptive admit." The lucky presumptive admits will likely be admitted right away. At our rather typical state law school, this category accounted for half the students admitted! Of course, at the other end, there are the automatic rejects, again essentially on grades and test scores alone.

Just in case you're harboring some illusion that law schools care about your community service or your immortal soul, you should know that the Law School Admission Test is scored so it's easy for the number to be added to the normal undergraduate grade point average and divided by two to construct a total index number. The required writing sample, on the other hand, is ungraded. If admissions officers were going to be concentrating on your (ungraded) writing sample, why would they want to make this scoring business so easy for themselves? As it works, if you had a 3.50 undergraduate score and an LSAT of 170, you'd wind up with an index of 3.5; LSAT 170 and 3.0 average generates an index of 3.25. Notice that unless the law school tinkers with the formula, as some do, three or four years of undergraduate effort and the three hours of LSAT are weighed the same! Moreover, one of my more LSAT-oriented colleagues at a prestigious West Coast school has told me that his admissions people create their own number, which weighs the LSAT even more heavily than 50 percent, because they believe it's the best predictor of law school performance. (Because women do less well than men do on the LSAT on average, note that this procedure, rightly or wrongly, has the effect of disadvantaging women.)

So a really clever strategy might be to pick a pretty easy college and an easy college major to jack up your grades and then to devote yourself to preparing for the LSAT with as much effort as you put into doing your college work. There are two drawbacks to this approach. First, law school admissions officials say that they look at the status of the undergraduate institution and major; one admissions dean even said he worked his opinion of the college into the formula, favoring colleges whose graduates had in past years turned out to be good law students at their school. Even the index-oriented school I interviewed admitted that college quality was "one of several concerns," although they could not spend the time to "make fine distinctions" among the hundreds of applicants.

Those of you who think you're getting away with something by beating on your college professors to raise your grades should know that the Law School Admission Services tells the admissions officers about where there's been grade inflation by reporting the grade point averages for all applicants to law school from a particular institution. Since it's unlikely everyone applying is a straight- A student under some uninflated standard, if your school sends a pile of seniors to apply with straight As, the admissions officers are going to suspect that an A might not be worth as much there as at a more hierarchical school. One admissions expert I talked to reported that his school engaged in an extremely elaborate original data-gathering scheme to find out where the grade inflation was, to avoid being fooled by it in admissions.

Second, most law school applicants major in subjects not known for their extreme difficulty, like social sciences and humanities, although more women than men major in social sciences, like history, sociology, and education, than humanities, like classics, philosophy, and foreign languages. So choosing a high- grading college and majoring in something easy is probably not a foolproof strategy.

The argument against devoting yourself to preparing for the LSAT is that it's hard to judge how much difference preparing for the LSAT makes in your scores. I'm going to recommend that you do the preparation. If we even guess that lots of preparation will jack up your LSAT scores, it would be worth doing, considering the emphasis law schools place on the LSAT. As a matter of pure cost/benefit analysis, it pays to cram for the LSAT.

Despite the problems with the pure grades and scores approach, it is still true that the fastest way into law school is to do everything humanly possible to extract a high score from the unforgiving Law School Admission Test and the second fastest way is to bust your ass in college. Women,.who often learn from the culture that they can get a lot of what they want by charm or good looks, have said they think law schools care about social characteristics or look for some sort of "well-rounded" profile. Remember, half the students at the pretty desirable law school I looked at got in without anyone in the admissions process even knowing whether they were (or were not) the social chairman of their sorority or tutored underprivileged children.

The exceptions to the grades and scores rule are: (1) if you fall into the gray area at a law school you're interested in or (2) if you apply to a handful of extremely selective law schools who have more top-scoring students than they can accept or (3) if you happen to pick one of the dwindling number of law schools who read the whole file. In these three areas, there are some possibilities for creating a more well-rounded image, which we will talk about in a minute. But first things first.

The LSAT Tills Admissions Toward White Men, But We re Not Going to Let That Stop Us

The LSAT has been scrutinized very closely for a reason having nothing to do with women and law school: According to the Law School Admission Council, people of color have lower mean test scores than whites do. Indeed, a study from the LSAC reports that much of the difference between men's scores and women's scores on the LSAT disappears if you compare white men and white women; because more minority women than men apply to law school, their typically lower mean scores bring the women's scores down. Accordingly, a great deal of time and effort has been spent to see whether the LSAT is actually predictive, because otherwise it's nothing more than a socially damaging barrier cleverly designed to keep the law schools mostly white and male, like adding points for having facial hair or having an ancestor who came to America on the Mayflower. The LSAT may also function indirectly to keep law school mostly male, despite women's dominance in college graduation rates, because fear of not doing well on the LSAT may discourage women from applying at all.

The first thing you need to know is that women's scores are only a tiny bit lower than men's are on average-and at every point along the way. Not surprisingly, women's first-year grades are only a little less good than men's are, once admitted. The bad news is that a small difference can mean a lot: One law school guide reported rejections of several candidates with a 150 LSAT score who would have gotten in had their scores been a trivially improved 155. Men supposedly care about small differences in measurement; women should start to care, too.

A recent, as yet unpublished, study of law students' performance done at UCLA reveals that for the 5,800 students at thirty-some American law schools examined, LSAT scores are the single most powerful predictor of first-semester grade performance. UCLA turned up the fact that there is a practically significant difference between how women score and how men score in first-year grades, but that the difference disappears if you compare men and women of equal LSAT scores. In other words, since women do slightly less well than men do on the LSAT, and since LSAT scores predict first-semester grades, women do slightly less well than men do on first-semester grades. So the argument over the predictive value of the LSAT actually slides into an argument about the value of the testing methods that produce the LSAT and the first-year grades. Do we need to train lawyers to exhibit the skills and characteristics that the LSAT and the first-semester teaching process are designed to reward? Even though women do a little less well at that process?

One way to answer that question is to pursue the relationship between LSAT/first semester grades and success in the rest of the profession. My data reflect that LSAT scores don't heavily predict whether students make law review. Unless the women's LSATs at the success schools like NYU and ASU were much higher than their male classmates' LSATs, there is a discrepancy between UCLA's conclusion that LSATs mostly predict performance and my findings that women make law review in excess of their class presence at ASU and NYU. Similarly, unless women's LSATs at schools like George Mason and McGeorge are much lower than their male classmates' LSATs, LSATs also would not powerfully explain the failure to make law review there.

Some of this discrepancy may be explained by the narrowness of the UCLA survey (only thirty schools), but more of the explanation lies in the fact that first-semester grades are only one factor in the competition for law review. Since many of the slots on law review are claimed by people who have the research and writing skills to prevail in the writing competitions that are commonly required or who have the determination to compete even if their grades alone were not enough to qualify them, it is fair to say that except insofar as LSATs predict first-semester grades, LSATs don't heavily predict ability to make and perform on law review.

In fact, neither UCLA nor the Law School Admission Council claims that the LSAT predicts ability to make law review or the whole three years of performance in law school, although, naturally, doing less well the first year would affect the three year average. Since predicting three years of performance would be a much more powerful argument for keeping the test than predicting one year of performance, the fact the testers don't make that claim would seem to indicate that they don't have data to support it. (Remember, UCLA only looked at first-semester grades.) And they are certainly not reporting that the LSAT predicts performance in the profession.

Probably a better indicator of how the LSAT relates to the legal profession is the relationship between LSAT scores and graduation and LSAT scores and bar passage. The Law School Admission Council studied racial minorities admitted to law school when their index (LSAT and UGPA) would not have indicated they were eligible at all, and concludes that those lower-scoring candidates passed the bar at only a slightly lower rate than the higher- scoring candidates would have done. So, on balance, the LSAT probably keeps law school more male and more white, while not being very useful beyond first-year grades. Against these drawbacks, the chief defenders of the standardized tests are the test givers themselves and people who like to believe that intelligence is all genetic, so the people on top of the ladder now naturally deserve to be there.

This does not mean that minority women should be discouraged. The LSAC's Thinking About Law School: A Minority Guide, contains a good chapter on these issues. There is a substantial movement afoot to reduce or eliminate the use of the LSAT for law school admissions. Until that day arrives, however, women of all races and ethnicities need to worry about how to do as well as possible on it.

An Overview of the LSAT

The Law School Admission Test is a three-hour test consisting of five parts and a writing sample. (The writing sample is not graded, just sent to the admissions people.) The other five parts consist of four real parts (one section of reading comprehension, one of analytical reasoning, and two sections of logical reasoning) and a "wild card" section to help the test makers develop future tests. You will know you have a wild card section when you see an extra version of one of the sections, two reading comprehensions, for example, but you won't know which of the two sections is real during the test.

Reading Comprehension for the LSAT

Reading comprehension is the most familiar subject for people with a humanities or social science education; it's what you've been doing-or did-for four years, reading in English to extract information in an efficient way. You're doing it right now, in fact. The reading comprehension the LSAT tests is a little different from normal in that it is sort of intended to test the level of your distrust rather than your capacity to extract information from a trusted source. In most college courses, you assume that the material your teacher has selected for you is reliable and important. Accordingly, you read it hoping to grasp as much of what it says as possible. In the adversary system, people often use words in order to persuade and even manipulate the reader; as the University of Chicago Law School's resident philosopher Martha Nussbaum (who is not a lawyer) reminded me in an interview, lawyers, as Socrates was accused of doing, learn to "make the lesser argument appear the greater." (In the end, of course, Socrates's fellow citizens rewarded him with a cup of poison.) So the reading "comprehension" section of the LSAT actually tests the extent to which you can resist being fooled by sneaky reading material.

Does it matter if the test taker is a male or a female in the exercise I've just described? Well, one respectable school of psychology asserts that, for cultural or natural reasons, women are more interested in maintaining relationships and accomplishing ends than in one-upping one another, so thinking like an adversary may not come as easily to women. Furthermore, women use words to maintain relationships, so treating words, of all things, as untrustworthy may also be harder for women. Nonetheless, the LSAT asks women and men alike to do this.

Here's how it works.

Sample Prep Questions for Readinq Comprehension

Most passages have a primary idea to get across. The test will often ask you to choose among five candidates for the main idea. For example, here's the paragraph you just read about the uniqueness of the LSAT exercise.

Reading comprehension is the most familiar subject for people with a humanities or social science education; it's what you've been doing-or did-for four years, reading in English to extract information in an efficient way. You're doing it right now, in fact. The reading comprehension the LSAT tests is a little different from normal in that it is sort of intended to test the level of your distrust rather than your capacity to extract information from a trusted source. In most college courses, you assume that the material your teacher has selected for you is reliable and important.

Accordingly, you read it hoping to grasp as much of what it says as possible. In the adversary system, people often use words in order to persuade and even manipulate the reader; as the University of Chicago Law School's resident philosopher, Martha Nussbaum (who is not a lawyer) reminded me the other day, lawyers, as Socrates was accused of doing, learn to "make the lesser argument appear the greater." (In the end, of course, Socrates's fellow citizens rewarded him with a cup of poison.) So the reading "comprehension" section of the LSAT actually tests the extent to which you can resist being fooled by sneaky reading material.

The LSAT would ask:

Question 1: Which of the following best captures the main idea of the passage?
 

1. The LSAT ought to test whether you can resist being fooled by what you read.
2. Adversary systems rely on fooling people.
3. The adversary system of the legal profession is different from other human relationships.
4. The LSAT reading comprehension is different from the trusting reading you learned in college.
5. The LSAT tests how well you will understand law school reading assignments.

The correct answer is (D). (A) overreaches; I said nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the method the LSAT uses, just described what it did. (B) is partially correct, but is a small fact used to build the main point. (C) is too broad; the reading is about the test, not about the profession in general. (E) is both too broad and too narrow; it's not clear exactly how the test relates to law school reading assignments, so the statement is too broad, and the passage is making a larger point than just the relationship between law school and the test. The passage is discussing the relationship between law school/LSAT-type reading and the college reading you're used to, so the statement is also too narrow.

By asking you what the main idea of the passage is, the test is really asking you to be alert to statements that overreach and claim for the passage more than it is fairly saying and to distinguish between the building blocks of a conclusion and the conclusion itself.

The reading comprehension also may ask a narrower question about the passage. For instance, such a question may ask the following:

Question 2: The passage states that the adversary system:
 

1. Makes the best arguments it can with the available material.
2. Makes weak arguments appear strong.
3. Requires people not to trust one another.
4. Assumes that you read to extract information.
5. Explains why people dislike lawyers.

The correct answer is (A). Although the passage seems to say (B) that the system makes weak arguments strong, that is an exaggeration, and is further weakened by the fact that it is a comparison to the death of Socrates, not a direct description. (C), Requires people not to trust each other, is too broad, and (D), Assumes that you read to extract information, is an assumption in the passage, just not one having to do with the adversary system. (E), Explains why people dislike lawyers, is also an inference, not a statement in the passage. So (A) is the best answer.

If the question asked about inferences, as they often do, they are looking to see if you can smoke out what the author is counting on you to believe, rather than what she has to say explicitly and defend. So:

Question 3: It can be inferred from the passage that lawyers use words to manipulate, because:
 

1. They are naturally untrusting and untrustworthy.
2. They make more money that way.
3. They learned in law school to be sneaky.
4. The adversary system directs them to do so.
5. They are unconsciously emulating Socrates.

Remember, in an inference question, none of the answers appears explicitly in the text. The author is counting on you to supply the missing link between what is said and the conclusion the question is suggesting, in this case that lawyers use words to manipulate. (D) is the answer. The passage says that in the adversary system, people use words to manipulate. The author is expecting you to infer that there is something about the adversary system that makes this happen. This is a hard question, because each of these inferences is in some way rooted in the text, except (B), more money, which can be eliminated immediately. But (A), (C), and (E) are all further away from the line of argument "adversary, therefore manipulative" than (D). (A) really appears nowhere in the text, except in the far-fetched argument that the LSAT tests for the ability to withhold trust, (C) requires two jumps-from sneaky to adversarial system and from adversary system to legal education, and (E) is a little too close to humor to be a legitimate answer in the deadly serious structure of the LSAT.

Other reading comprehension questions ask you to identify the structure of the argument in the passage or the author's 'attitude." For example, the LSAT may ask whether the argument gives a bunch of examples and then draws a conclusion from them, the method known as inductive reasoning, or whether the conclusion is stated first, followed by examples, or whether other structures of argument are used. These questions are not asking for the content of the passage, but asking you to identify the technique the writer uses to carry you, the reader, along with his or her argument process. In the passage on reading comprehension, I gave an account of something, why reading comprehension is different for the LSAT, followed by a reason for it, because the adversary system produces untrustworthy writings, and then drew a conclusion about how testing for untrustworthiness might be unfamiliar to the average college student. So the structure is account, explanation, conclusion.

On attitude questions, the LSAT asks you to imagine the writer as a person and figure out his degree of adversarial commitment to the statements he is making. Is the writer telling the story as a committed advocate, to make you believe? Is the writer telling it because the writer is critical of the material? Is the writer not only critical, but optimistic that the situation the writer is describing will change? My attitude toward the reading comprehension section of the LSAT is neutral to critical of the system (if nothing else told you that, the little remark about Socrates being poisoned would be a hint) but doubtful that it can be replaced. So you would choose critical but skeptical over, say, committed or optimistic.

Lessons from the Reading Comprehension Examples

These few examples are not a substitute for test preparation, of which more in a minute. I put them before you to teach you a specific lesson. In the legal system, words are a tool in a system of persuasion, not a neutral reflection of the world or a way to establish and maintain human harmony. A bunch of words together usually has a main idea, a couple of smaller ideas that the writer is using to support the main idea, a couple more unspoken ideas, or inferences, that the author is counting on you to bring to the party, an order of presentation intended to persuade you, and an attitude he or she wants you to adopt, like indignation or, at the other end, passionate support. When you get a legal document, you soon learn to read it, looking for these five things: main idea, supporting ideas, inferences, structure, and attitude. Can you break down written material in these ways? This is what the LSAT is testing for.

Even though this mind-set might be harder for some women, I have a mental exercise to help you practice. Just open a piece of written work and pretend it's some guy you just had sex with telling you he'll call you. In the morning.

Analytical Reasoning

This section sets forth a set of rules and asks you to test how real situations stack up against the rules imposed. In that sense, like the skeptical reading in the reading comprehension, the test is related to what law school teaches and ultimately to some of what lawyers do.

Remember the example from the earlier article of the law that requires a contracting party to be eighteen years old? What if a college freshman friend of yours came to you and said he had contracted to buy an expensive computer from a senior in his dorm, and he now didn't want to pay for it. (Maybe IBM had just come out with a new generation of computers, rendering the computer he just bought obsolete.) Turns out, your young friend is one of those prodigies who went to college early, so he was just sixteen when he contracted for the computer. You would be called on to advise your friend on whether he could get out of his contract. You would first ask about the law of contract. You might learn that the general law of contract only enforces contracts between adults of eighteen or older. You would then ask questions of the situation designed to find out what must be true for a party to be able to escape the contract. What must be true of the facts of your case? A reading of the terms of the law of contract tells you that, for contract law to operate on his side, it must be true that your friend is really younger than eighteen.

Then you would ask questions designed to find out what cannot be true. You might find a case that held that contracts will be enforced even against underage contractors, like a sixteen-year- old, if the person seeking to get out of the contract misrepresented his age. If so, you will know that under the law of contract as interpreted by the courts, it cannot be that a person who deliberately tried to fool his contract partner gets to repudiate his contracts. As a matter of fact, it cannot be true that your friend tried to pass himself off as a mature man about campus, or he's stuck.

Finally, you would ask questions to find out what the law and cases might allow your client to do and still get off. Is it possible that someone who just lived in a college dorm, which would indicate odds are that he's eighteen, but didn't actively pretend to be eighteen, might get off? It's possible, because he didn't make statements misleading enough to compel enforcement of the contractor forthright enough to make enforcement an open-and-shut case. Or it's not possible for your client to get off, because the opinion holding the misrepresenting sixteen-year-old to his contract says, "Anyone found in a place where people of adult age normally gather is implying he's an adult." Then you wouldn't bother asking your client what he said to the computer seller because it wouldn't be possible that his statements would matter.

Rather than present you with real legal opinions, from which you might figure out what must be the case for the law to apply, what cannot be the case, and where the wiggle room is, the LSAT tries to abstract from this process and test how quickly you can figure out three things from a description of a physical situation: what must be true (what's necessary), what cannot be true (what's impossible), and what might be true (what's possible). The LSAT uses two methods to test this: asking you to put one set of things in order (simple order) or asking you to keep track of two kinds of order (harder order). Then it presents you with different suggested orders and asks what orders must be true, what orders cannot be true, and what orders may be true.

Let's start with the simple order. It doesn't matter whether the order is over time, like asking you to figure out the order in which people became partners of a law firm, or over space, like asking you who sits near whom at a table, or is an artificial order like who scores higher than whom on the exam. It's all about order; more importantly, it's all about necessary orders, impossible orders, and possible orders. You may find that it helps you to answer by making a little diagram of years or a seating chart, but you'll learn the details of that when you take the prep courses or when you practice from the test prep books that are all over the bookstores. As far as I can tell, women and men prepare for the analytical reasoning section of the LSAT pretty much the same way. The only barrier particular to women, if there is any, is that women may be less willing to just leap in and do something that looks so unconnected to anything they've ever known. That's why I'm showing you what the test givers are really doing.

Sample Test Prep for Analytical Reasoning

Example 1

Weather analysts took temperatures from six Arizona cities on a series of days. No two cities were the same temperature on the same day. Yuma, Arizona, is always the hottest city. Phoenix was hotter than Flagstaff each time. Tucson was hotter than Prescott every time. Winslow was somewhere between Flagstaff and Prescott every time.
Note that this is an open-ended set of facts. You could make yourself a little diagram to fill in as the questions about this fact pattern roll by, which would look like this:
Known:
 

1. Yuma.
2. Not Prescott or Flagstaff.

Variable, but
 

1. Phoenix always above Flagstaff.
2. Tucson always above Prescott and
3. Flagstaff never next to Prescott.
4. Winslow always between Flagstaff and Prescott.

In a multiple choice situation, this gives you a fast way to identify any answer with Yuma below first place or Prescott in second place as impossible (and therefore wrong, unless the test is asking you to identify the unacceptable answer). The test continues. . . .

Question 1: If Phoenix is the third hottest city on a particular day, then what must be true of the temperatures on that day?
 

1. Prescott was the second hottest.
2. Flagstaff was the second hottest.
3. Prescott was the fourth hottest.
4. Winslow was the fifth hottest.
5. Flagstaff was the sixth hottest.

I'm going to show you how to figure it out before I tell you the answer, because that's what happens on a test, right? Here's a fast way to figure it out. We are asking what must be true (what is necessary) of a set of facts. Technically, a fast first thing to do is to look for a lie about the one city you know must be on top,Yuma, and eliminate that choice, and which comes in handy if you run out of time and have to guess, because it cuts down on the number of choices you have in front of you when the moment comes to guess. But the test givers aren't usually that generous. So after you've quickly looked at the choices to eliminate any that have Yuma below the top, you have to look for the next easiest elimination. In this problem, Prescott and Flagstaff can never be second, because Tucson must always be hotter than Prescott and Phoenix must always be hotter than Flagstaff, so, Yuma, always being first, must occupy the only spot above second, so you can eliminate (A), which puts Prescott at second place and (B), which puts Flagstaff at second place.

That's all you can do without using the new facts. There, the testers have fixed Phoenix, too, setting it firmly in third place. This tells you to look at the overall fact pattern for what it says about Phoenix's relationship with any other city, and you will find that it tells you Phoenix was hotter than Flagstaff. So if Phoenix is third, Flagstaff must be fourth, fifth, or sixth. The order now looks like: 1. Yuma 2. Not Prescott 3. Phoenix 4. Flagstaff? 5. Flagstaff? 6.

Flagstaff? The only new information is about Flagstaff, so it stands to reason that the testers now expect us to focus on Flagstaff. Now you ask yourself what we know about Flagstaff, which we have now sort of pinned down. We know that Winslow is always between Flagstaff and Prescott. The only place next to Flagstaff with room on the other side is fifth place. If we put Winslow in sixth place, nothing is after sixth place, and if we put Winslow in fourth place, it will have Flagstaff on one side (okay), but where will its other bracket city, Prescott, have to be? Second. Now we know Prescott can never be second. So Winslow must be in fifth place, and the answer is (D). Note that this problem is answered without ever solving whether it's Flagstaff, Winslow, Prescott or Prescott, Winslow, Flagstaff (C and E). Either of those orders is possible, but the question didn't ask what's possible; it asked what must always be true.

Next the testers usually ask you to figure out what's possible. Here's what that looks like:

Question 2: Which of the following temperature readings might have happened on a given day [hottest to coldest/?
 

1. Yuma, Flagstaff, Phoenix, Winslow, Tucson, Prescott.
2. Yuma, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Winslow, Prescott, Tucson.
3. Yuma, Phoenix, Winslow, Flagstaff, Tucson, Prescott.
4. Phoenix,Yuma, Prescott, Winslow, Flagstaff, Tucson.
5. Yuma, Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott, Winslow, Flagstaff.

In a question about what's possible, even one mistake eliminates the choice (remember the "deliberately misrepresented his age" aspect of the rulings on competency to contract?), so you don't have to figure out what the order is, which is hard and would take too long. Just test each choice for any mistake. We know from the problem that the simplest fact is that Yuma is always first. Look at the choices to see if Yuma is ever not first. Oh, boy! In (D), Phoenix is first. That eliminates (D) as a possibility; scratch it out. Prescott is never second, but the testers haven't given us that option, so that knowledge isn't useful in this particular question. Flagstaff is never second, so that eliminates (A).

Next, pick any relationship from the facts. Tucson must be hotter than Prescott. That eliminated (B), where they have Prescott hotter than Tucson. Then ask whether, in the remaining choices, Winslow is always between Flagstaff and Prescott. In (C), Tucson, rather than Winslow, is between Flagstaff and Prescott, which eliminates (C), so the answer is (E). Since any mistake eliminates a choice in a possibility question, possibility questions are often easier, so if you are short of time, you might try to do those first.

Third, the test may ask what cannot be true (impossible). Here, all the choices but one will be right, so the technique again is to look for any single mistake and there's your answer. This is even easier than the possibility question.

Question 3: Which order cannot describe the temperature in Arizona on any given day?
 

1. Yuma, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Winslow, Tucson, Prescott.
2. Yuma, Phoenix, Tucson, Winslow, Flagstaff, Prescott.
3. Yuma, Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Winslow, Prescott.
4. Yuma, Tucson, Prescott, Winslow, Phoenix, Flagstaff.
5. Yuma, Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Winslow, Prescott.

Is Yuma ever not first? Nope. Darn. Is Flagstaff ever hotter than Phoenix? Nope. Ah, they're making it a little harder. Is Prescott or Flagstaff ever second? No, again. Double darn. Is Tucson ever below Prescott? No, again. Is Flagstaff ever next to Prescott? (Leaving no room for Winslow in between?) Yep, in (B), Flagstaff is next to Prescott. Can't be. It's the only one that's clearly wrong, so (B) is the answer.

The who sits next to whom problems (people at a negotiation, never people at a dinner party!) work the same way. Just look for what's forbidden, and where they add a new fact, use that as quickly as possible.

The test givers often make the problem more complex by involving more than one variable-multiple colors, different spaces, etc. Since this isn't a test prep guidebook (you will go to one of the professional prep companies for that), I will leave the rest of the exotic variations up to them. As far as I can tell, as a mechanical matter, women and men must prepare for the analytical reasoning section of the LSAT in pretty much the same way.

The Lessons from Analytical Reasoning

All analytical reasoning problems proceed step by step from the facts you know to what you know about their relationship to other facts to the answer. Ergo,

1) It pays to start out by writing down quickly the facts you know in an easily visible format. If there are only two variables, like cities and temperatures, I just make a list. If there are more, like years and modems and hookups, I like a grid format that allows me to see a lot of facts and possible facts at once and move them around as I learn more. Use a pencil to make the grid quickly at the beginning and then just erase or mark the grid as new data become available to you.

2) Don't read forward until you've organized. Read the basic problem and make your list or grid. Then look at the first question and note if what they're asking for must be true, is possibly true, or can't be true. No point to blowing the answer because you misread the question. The list or grid from the first set of facts will hold for all the questions the testers ask from the fact pattern. If a problem doesn't add anything more, just compare each answer to what the grid or list tells you at that point and the answer should emerge.

3) If a problem adds a new fact, I usually ask the easy questions anyway, like Is Yuma ever out of place?, to eliminate or identify obvious answers. Then I turn to the new fact and put it in place and then I go back and ask where the new fact is mentioned in the old fact pattern. Usually, the new fact allows you to take a relationship left sort of open in the basic fact pattern, like Phoenix is always hotter than Flagstaff (which doesn't tell you which number Phoenix is), and make that relational information firmer.

Logical Reasoning

The test contains more sections of logical reasoning than any other. The "logic" of the LSAT is a distant cousin of the logic you may have learned, for example, in a logic course in college, but, like the reading comprehension, it is designed to test your ability to see an argument coming at you, identify what its parts are, and see its weaknesses and strengths. Here, again, the exercise is simply one of cautious reading; recognize every sentence as an attempt to make you believe something and don't give the author any more credit for truth than is absolutely necessary. Like the reading comprehension, logical reasoning often asks you to identify the main line of argument, infer something from the argument, or identify the structure of the argument. LR also asks you to identify the best argument against the passage and to identify flaws in the argument explicitly.

Sample Test Prep for Logical Reasoning

A logical reasoning passage might read as follows:

Something must be done about our weather prediction system here in Tennessee. It rained two inches in an hour yesterday with little warning. If the rain had been snow, we would have been buried under two feet of snow and we would have had little warning of the blizzard.

The logical reasoning testers might ask several questions from a fact pattern like this, although LR usually involves a different fact pattern for each question. For example:

Question 1: Which of the following, if true, would be the most serious objection to the argument?
 

1. Many people would rather be warned in error than not warned when threatened.
2. Actually, if the rain had been snow, the snow might have risen to two and a half feet, not two feet.
3. If the air had been cold enough for snow, the moisture the air could hold would have been much less.
4. When it snows in Tennessee, it usually catches people more unprepared than rain does.
5. People would prefer to be surprised by rain than to be caught unprepared when it snows.

The best objection is (C). This is so because the whole argument rests on the assumption that a rainstorm, a common occurrence of little threat, and a bad blizzard are interchangeable. But this is nonsense; the natural facts that produce rainstorms and snowstorms are not interchangeable. (A) is irrelevant to the argument, or at best weakly supports it. (B) is also irrelevant. The small degree of blizzard is trivial once bad snow conditions are reached.

(D) and (E) actually support the call for better predictions.

Question 2: Which of the following best describes the logical structure of the argument?
 

1. A statement of a specific event followed by a statement of a general rule.
2. A statement of a general rule followed by an instance of a specific event.
3. A statement of a specific event followed by a statement of a general rule followed by a specific event.
4. A statement of a conclusion supported by an historical event followed by a prediction.
5. A statement of a conclusion supported by a specific event.

The correct answer is (D). First the writer gives a conclusion (weather prediction should be better), then an example of the questionable state of affairs that's not terrible in itself (rained without prediction) followed by a prediction of worse ("If the rain had been snow . . .").

Question 3: What is the structural weakness of such an argument?
 

1. The historical event does not manifest the general conclusion.
2. The historical event does not predict the predicted event.
3. The predicted event does not support the general conclusion.
4. The two events contradict one another.
5. The historical event is too specific to support the general conclusion.

This is a little harder, because the rain/snow argument is pretty weak, even though we hear it on the weather report all the time. The best answer to identify the weakness of the argument is (B),because it takes a pretty sophisticated theory to tell us whether rainstorms are like snowstorms, whereas common sense could support the leap from bad predicting to unpredicted rainstorm (A), and common sense could support the leap from bad predicting to unpredicted snowstorm (C), the two events are not obviously contradictory, we just don't know (D), and an unpredicted rainstorm is some evidence for the general conclusion of bad predicting (E).

Lessons from Logical Reasoning

The hardest thing about logical reasoning is carefully reading the passage. An example from the LSAT a few years ago turned on whether people who quit smoking do so because they're aware of the dangers of smoking or because they become aware of the dangers of smoking from government warnings. The passage criticized the ineffectiveness of government warnings. When asked to choose an argument that rebutted the passage, many people chose the answer that noted people had stopped smoking because they were aware of the danger, missing the fact that the proffered answer-awareness-didn't necessarily stem from government warnings. The folks at the LSAC had the good grace to classify the question as difficult. Less than half the test takers answered it correctly. Including me.

There Is No Quick Way to Game the LSAT

Your faithful guide took the better part of a week to do the problems and figure out the structure of the LSAT sufficiently to write the preceding sections. One third-forty pages-of the ARCO guide, Getting into Law School Today, is devoted to samples from and an analysis of the LSAT.

The LSAT is not like learning how to ride a bike, which most girls do. It's like learning how to catch a baseball properly, which not enough girls are taught to do. You could guess at how to catch a small object coming right at you at a high speed. But as millions of guys know, you will be better off if you let other people teach you how to play and drill you until you're fast. Why do you think all those Little League parents are out there on suburban evenings tossing the ball and tossing the ball and tossing the ball?

There are three ways to get good at playing the LSAT. Cheap, pretty expensive, and really expensive. The cheap way is to buy the test prep books. There are a gazillion books. If you're very cheap, you can hang around the places where college seniors live in late fall and buy their test prep books for a song after they take the test and certainly after they get their scores. The cheapest books for the amount of drill are the LSAC's own books, which contain exams from past years with explanations.

Taking Kaplan as an example of commercial prep materials, commercial materials, however expensive, are written by real human beings who have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how the test works, so you can bring strategies to bear on recognizing and solving the problems quickly. The official LSAT guide sounds as if it were written by a bunch of pompous blowhards. For example, in explaining one of the problems in logical reasoning, the LSAT guide presents an entirely new argument it claims is parallel to the problem and then gives you the following helpful advice:

Notice that there are several differences between this argument and the one in the passage. The second premise has no "NOT" in (A), and the entities in question are arranged differently in the two arguments: in the first premise, "radishes" corresponds to "Paulsville" and "peppers" corresponds to "Longtown," but in the second premise, "radishes" corresponds to "Salisbury," and "spinach" corresponds to "Paulsvillewhile in the third premise, "spinach" corresponds to "Salisbury," and in the conclusion, "peppers" corresponds to "Longtown."

Kaplan gives you "The Kaplan Five Step Method for Logic Games":
 

1. Get an overview
2. Visualize and map out the Game

and so forth. The answers are broken down into simple steps of reasoning, one after the other. Explaining a seating problem, for example, Kaplan says, "Question 5, in its exploration of who can or cannot sit across from whom, explicitly places two people in chairs and allows you to do likewise with a third. Specifically, if Stanley is in Chair 3, Tonga (who again has to be next to Stanley along a long side of the table) has to take the other chair along that side, Chair 2. [And then just in case you missed it, the author repeats] Stanley in 3, Tonga in 2, and Matt in 6."

What's the difference? To use the LSAT explanations, you need to be as good at the sample problems as you are for the LSAT! What's added? Just a little drill. The Kaplan explanations (and the others-Princeton, ARCO, etc.) teach you techniques to make it easier to do the problems and add drill. I don't have a preference among the books; if you're going to prepare from the books alone, you would probably be best off buying one of the commercial books to learn the shortcuts and then using the cheaper books from the LSAC that give you the tests from the last few years with answer sheets as practice questions to try out the tricks you've learned on a large number of questions.

Kaplan, like Princeton Review, the other national test prep company, offers a computer-based prep course, on a CD-ROM. The computer program is actually a complete application program, which tells you what materials you need to gather to apply, apprises you of deadlines, and essentially walks you through the whole process. On the test preparation side, the computer program offers a diagnostic test (to see how you are at the outset) and a final test in written form, to be answered on-screen, and the prep tests on-screen. The advantage of the computer is that the graphics are cute, it satisfies people with a taste for working on computers, and it's a little more stressful than the paper-based test prep, because a somewhat human voice shouts at you that you have limited time and the program includes distracting noises. Since the test is stressful, it probably pays to have a stressful prep course to get you used to the stress. The disadvantage of computer prep is that the LSAT so far is a paper test, so preparing on computer is one step removed from the experience, never a good thing.

Money Well Spent?

Finally, you can take a cram course for the LSAT. There are other courses available locally, including some offered by colleges, so be sure and check with the prelaw adviser or career services, as those courses are likely to be cheaper.

Kaplan and Princeton are expensive, so everyone wants to know if they work, and the conventional wisdom is that we're not sure. We're not sure, because to find out for certain if they work, we'd have to have the same person take the same test without the prep and then take it again after taking each course, and even then they'd be taking the same test twice. Of course, no one has done that. Both Princeton and Kaplan claim that they raise the scores of students in their courses five, six, or seven points. They make this claim in part based on their own internal testing, which involves comparing the score their people get on a diagnostic test at the start of the course with their score on an exit test or on the actual LSAT.

Although we don't know as much about the LSAT, Kaplan, Princeton, and the test givers have been battling it out since the late seventies about the more mass-based Scholastic Assessment Test (formerly, Scholastic Aptitude Test; Kaplan led a crusade to change the name). After the testers pressured the Federal Trade Commission to go after Kaplan for fraud in claiming his courses could raise SAT scores, the FTC commissioned a big study that produced the finding that Kaplan's coaching did indeed raise scores! In fact, the FTC's own lawyer, who left the FTC during the study, went public when the study was announced saying that it actually supported much bolder claims for test coaching. Recently, Kaplan had Price Waterhouse do a study of the Kaplan course's effectiveness, which produced the same outcome. Even more recently, researchers from the Educational Testing Service did a study that concluded the difference coaching produces at the SAT level is trivial, and, again, the test prep companies like Kaplan and Princeton characterized the findings as inconclusive. My favorite comment on the cram courses comes from an old article by the then editor of U.S. News & World Report, James Fallows. Of course coaching would help, he wrote years ago. "You can tell that just by looking at the questions."

Seen against this background, the answer seems obvious: Take the course. Princeton Review was good enough to share with me the information that their internal data do not show the course helping women or men more, but here again the women may be self-selecting. The women taking the Princeton Review course for the LSAT are thinking strategically, as you're going to do, deciding that it's worth the money to increase their chances of ad-missions, and the select group of women who think strategically are probably going to be just as good as any group of men on an exam that tests, among other things, for the capacity to think in a very clever, self-interested way.

But I want all women law students to be clever. Let's figure it out. All students score between 120 and 180 on the test, a spread of 60. Every seven-point drop is more than 10 percent of the spread. In the 1997 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, the median LSAT score at top-ranked Yale Law School was a staggering 171. That's a median, so of course not everyone scored that high, but when you are thinking of applying, your chances are of course greatest if you apply with a score as good as the median at the school or higher. If you scored seven points lower, let's say, because you didn't take the cram course and didn't get the benefit of their seven-point improvement, your median falls all the way to 164, which is median at fourteenth-ranked Northwestern. Lose another seven points (157), and you're aiming at forty-second- ranked University of Tennessee at Knoxville, or forty-sixth- ranked Case Western Reserve in Ohio. Lose another seven? At 150, you're aiming at schools in the magazine's unranked third tier of schools, ranked approximately 98-120, such as John Marshall of Illinois or Syracuse.

You are not a bad person if you didn't have a high LSAT. But presumably you're not going to law school for your moral wellbeing or pure intellectual stimulation, but to get a good job. According to U.S. News & World Report, Yale has a number-one placement success rate, while Northwestern's is only twenty-five, Tennessee is thirty-four, and Case is eighty-five. After the top fifty, the magazine stops evaluating placement success and just counts the percentage of students employed. Both John Marshall and Syracuse have employment rates of 81 percent.

I'm going to suggest something even nastier than grinding away at the Princeton Review three nights a week for six weeks in the summer before your senior year or whenever you take the LSAT. Buy the book from the course you're going to take and work your way through the book first, say in the early summer or Christmas vacation before the fall when most people take the test. Then try out the techniques on the LSAT prep tests from the past you can buy cheaply from the LSAC. Closer to the time of the test, take the course. (Don't switch from one book to a different course; you'll just get confused with the different techniques.) Remember, in many schools, the three-hour test counts the same as the three and one half years of college that went before.

Ms. Marginal and the Golden Parachute: Fudging

The Kaplan LSAT book opens with "Ten Things You Can Do Right Now to Boost Your Chances of Admission to Law School." Several of them, like "read this book," are not brilliantly helpful. The rest all relate to creating a market image of yourself as an applicant, weaving together a history of work, recommendations, and personal statement that can be useful, but, remember, only if your core grades and scores are in that fuzzy middle.

In fattening up a marginal application, the first thing you need to know is that most marginal applications go to a few faculty members in some fashion. At the high-middle-level law school I looked at, half the 1,800 applicants fell into the marginal group of 900. Five committees consisting of one faculty member and one student reviewed the other 900, or 180 applications per committee. The heavy presence of students in the process is unusual; at most schools, either the admissions dean who essentially makes the decisions is a present or former faculty member or the committees are all faculty. So you want to construct an application that will appeal to an imaginary law professor.

None of the gray area applications is compelling, but all are potentially acceptable or they'd have been thrown out in the first round. You might suspect that in choosing among all potentially acceptable applicants, law faculty might want to recruit a student body that resembles them as much as possible; that's certainly an important dynamic when they select their own teaching colleagues. This suspicion is almost impossible to pin down, because pure grade point and test scores determine so much of the class makeup, the political beliefs of the average law school class member are hard to find out, and there's a certain amount of self-selection and geographical selection. For example, the University of Chicago is famed for its attractiveness to conservative white men, who say they see it as the last haven of true principle in a politically correct world. So conservative applicants would self select there. The women I interviewed at Minnesota repeatedly referred to a white bread socially conservative Midwestern student as typical, while the women at UCLA found the opposite. Both could be attributed to geography and the appeal of in-state tuition, not a conscious decision on the part of the faculty admissions people.

Strategy #1: Make Yourself Look Like the School

If you have targeted a particular law school with a clear political environment, you may want to skew your image toward the likely commitments of the faculty reader. Thus, there are many more interestingly radical people at SUNY Buffalo than Boston University, more feminists at Stanford than Harvard, more postmodern deconstructionists at Cardozo than at Columbia, more libertarians at George Mason than Yale, more economists at Virginia than Duke, more social conservatives at Brigham Young and Notre Dame than at NYU or Berkeley. If you got one of the socially committed faculty members at one of these places on the committee that considered your application, you might benefit from constructing an image of yourself. For example, an English major whose senior thesis was about the lesbian subtext in Shakespeare's As You Like It and who worked at the battered women's shelter might fare better at Buffalo, Stanford, or Duke than at BU, Brigham Young, or Virginia. An engineer from Purdue whose senior thesis was about the application of economic analysis to allocation of research funds and whose summer job was at Lucent Technologies might do better at Virginia than Cardozo, and a political science major whose thesis was about the latent racism in the revival of Christian schools in the 1970's might do better at Yale than at Brigham Young.

Shaping your statement of interests to the profile the school provides in its catalogs is tricky, because the catalogs are public relations documents that the government would never allow if the schools were trying to sell you stock instead of tuition. Often many of the courses described are not currently taught, the teachers are not available, and the "programs" are little more than come-ons to attract students. If you sound too impressed with statements in the catalog, you're going to sound like a ditz, and nobody wants to admit a ditz. Before you shape your application toward a particular program or specialty at a law school, such as international law or environmental law, talk to students who are already specializing there and ask the admissions office for a listing of the current and next semester's actual course offerings. If you find the program is real, you can increase the impression that you will be a good community member by showing that your credentials particularly qualify you for what the law school offers. To avoid the risk that a particularly popular program will be harder to get into than the law school generally, express interest and admiration without limiting your appeal, unless you're sincerely only interested in going because of a particular specialty.

In the end, most faculty evaluators are looking for signs of success in the institution, not political reflections of themselves (they save that for when they hire faculty). Moreover, many admissions committee members are just technocrats teaching taxation with little concern for political or social imagery. And it's impossible to know what you're going to get. A better reason for a student to prefer a school where the politics are at least somewhat supportive is that they'll have one less battle to fight.

Strategy #2: Look Like a "Cowardly Liberal"

Reviewing a book about law school politics in the New York Times some time ago, the conservative federal judge Alex Kozinski described most law school faculties as consisting of irrational, anti-Semitic radicals on the one hand and, on the other hand, "cowardly liberals," who are more interested in keeping their safe jobs than fighting the radicals in their midst.

Although Kozinski doesn't mention it, the Cowardly Liberals are not interested in fighting conservatives, either. Indeed, most of the CLs actually have more in common with conservatives than radicals. Marooned somewhere around or just before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they regard all social developments since the mid-sixties as suspect. Kozinski is right, however, to say that CLs are probably the commonest species of law professor.

The safest strategy for an image to present to the CLs that make up most law school faculty is that of a hardworking student with a commitment to the strange mixture of social impact and technical skill that the legal profession represents, and a dollop of interesting hobbies thrown in. If you have some time after you've read this book, try to get a job or at least volunteer in a program that has a fairly traditional legal core anchored around 1964: court watching rather than battering counseling, interning at Court TV, not talk TV.

If you have a skill that you can use in a legal context, that shows that you were more than just free help. So if you're a good writer, don't just volunteer at the local shelter; start a newsletter for volunteer shelter workers. If you're a computer whiz, don't just run errands at the patent law firm; ask to help on their computer- based document management program or volunteer to train the other interns on computers wherever you are. If you're an artist (not the most common skill among lawyers), prepare graphically effective jury exhibits. If you're a good public speaker, volunteer to go around to college or high school career days and tell about your experiences working at the shelter or the firm or whatever. This tells the admissions people you're going to be a good community member, which matters to people constructing a community.

If your grades are lousy, try to bring them up a lot in the time that's left, creating a "prodigal daughter" image or at least showing that you're on the right track. Stay away from pass/fail courses unless they're very far from your major and you are just interested or to show that you stretched yourself beyond your limit of ability to acquire a needed skill. If your grade point average is already compromised by a lousy grade in math or a language, take the next-level class pass/fail (if you know you won't fail) and explain in your statement that you know there are just things you need to be able to do, whether they come with a gold star to wear on your resume or not. This shows admissions people that you can take adversity and are practical.

Most law schools are going to try to diversify their student body, whether by race, geography, age, or interest. There's not much you can do about the first three, but if you have a pattern of strong interests, it would not hurt to emphasize them. A brilliant athletic career is reputed to help applicants; I think the justice of rewarding athletes with law school is debatable, but I do recommend that you pursue a sport in any event, because the discipline may help you to stand up to the challenging first year of law school.

Is a record of feminist activism a red flag to admissions committees? This is a rational fear when applying to a law school with a suspiciously low percentage of women faculty, because women faculty present a largely male group with the possibility of activism that a woman student unmarked by an activist record does not display. Otherwise, I don't think a history of activism in women's issues is an automatic red flag to admissions committees. There is always the possibility that your application will cross the desk of one of the faculty members who has a commitment against women's success so profound that they will use their position to harm a relatively disempowered applicant. But the possibility is equally great in most places that you'll encounter someone who thinks your activism is a plus, because they remember the idealism of their youth or because it shows you're not a couch potato.

Although many people in powerful positions at law schools are resistant to women's issues in various ways, the raw injustice of discriminating against a candidate for that reason is so blatant and so inconsistent with deep-seated beliefs in freedom of thought in the academy that date back at least to the CLs' touchstone date of 1964 that the CLs should find it difficult to keep someone out because of a history of feminism. The issues of feminism that people like Kozinski are interested in tend to be disputes among faculty, like whether there is such a thing as objective truth, or whether sexuality is cultural or natural, not issues directly involved in the activism young people would be engaged in. In addition, women law students are generally so disempowered that faculty have no reason to fear them and therefore no reason to harm them by keeping them out.

Be aware, however, that the libertarian-type conservatives, like Judge Kozinski, as well as CLs, who formed their political identities in the sexually unbuttoned sixties, tend to be extremely sensitive to support for censorship of pornography or restraint of sexual harassment in the workplace, which many of them view as the equivalent to the end of Western civilization. So if you've been involved in Women Against Pornography, for instance, maybe a little censorship begins at home.

Letters from the Rich and Famous

The same analysis for shaping your application applies, of course, to the recommendations. All the guides say that the recommendations should be from people who have reason to know about the characteristics law schools care about: are you very smart, hardworking, imaginative, tenacious, and generous with your time and assets? The people who can know this are mostly your teachers, employers, and coworkers. Famous people, especially those met at the White House where your rich parents took you for coffee, or when they were guests on the MTV show where you were getting coffee, do not count.

On the other hand, if you believe people poured money into the 1996 political campaign on both sides out of love of democracy, you will also believe that it doesn't matter whom you know.

One of my favorite law students, Ms. Marginal, wanted so badly to go to a status law school that she called everyone, including a family friend whose husband went to law school with a dean, to make calls for her. She did get in, although I'd like to think it was more because the admissions office recognized her great tenacity than because the husband of a friend of the family went to Yale with the dean! So if you know a big donor or a famous judge and they can write you a sincere letter about one or more of the characteristics listed above, or call, I'm not going to discourage you from doing it. Of course, the smartest way to parlay a well- connected acquaintance is to do something for them in the way of work or service so they can write you an honest-to-God recommendation.

Most law schools allow you to submit a personal statement. Some limit the statement in various ways, mostly length (a page or two), and some ask for a particular topic or approach. The admissions officer I interviewed in an open-ended way mentioned the personal statement last in the list of "other things" the admissions committee looks for. The ARCO guide reports that many officers identified it as the most important part, but qualifies that immediately with "after the GPA and LSAT." I have a hard time imagining that a system so grounded in the GPA would look at an essay rather than at where the applicant went to college and what she studied there next. What I think is going on is that the admissions people have two levels of information: the "hard" data like GPA and college status and major comprise one category of information and then they turn to the second (and usually last) level of data-the statement, recommendations, unpaid or part-time employment. When they say the statement is important, it's usually because it's an efficient way to form an impression of all the rest of the candidate's qualifications. So the first thing to do in a personal statement is to use it as a vehicle to tell the admissions people about the strongest thing in your history that should motivate them to admit you.

We know that admissions committees want to admit people who will succeed at their institutions. Accordingly, they look for intelligence, hard work, a reasonable explanation for interest in the legal profession, tenacity, good time allocation, political skills, and communal commitment. Many aspects of a life can reflect these: a very hard major of study or training, a record of working at jobs along with going to school, a slow but steady climb up a ladder of organizational or academic hierarchy, positions of organizational leadership. Many do not: a story of channel surfing in the college curriculum, of hobbies taken up and dropped, of parentally supported leisure and frivolity like drinking or tourism, of grunt work and default to law school after a stint driving a cab. The good personal statements described in all the guidebooks have the following things in common: They always pick a story from the persons history that reflects intelligence, hard work, tenacity, skill, and sometimes legal interest, political ability, and communal interest.

So, what have you done that enables you to portray yourself that way? Clara Counselors story of looking up the law for the men in her unit in the military is hands down the best personal essay I've heard. But for those of you with somewhat less heroic histories, Clara Too's story would make a good personal statement. Here's how it would sound:

My dad was a lawyer, and I wanted to be like him. But when I went to Washington, I wasn't so excited to go to law school, because everyone goes to law school. Although I took the LSAT my senior year, law school is expensive and hard, so it's a serious enough decision to justify taking time off to think about it. While I was off, I signed up to work for a partner at a big law firm. Just as I started, he was appointed to be a federal judge, and he took me with him to his chambers. When I met his brilliant and interesting law clerks and I saw him and them debate the issues he faced as a federal judge, I became convinced that my original ambition was right.

Too's academic credentials already demonstrated her intelligence, but consider what this story adds: It tells the reader she exercises sober judgment, is serious about things that deserve serious analysis, has a generous inclination to help people, is interested in the world of law and was attracted to it because it is an intellectual challenge, which she wasn't just inferring from the catalog; she learned it in the hothouse atmosphere of a federal judge's chambers. No wonder she got in everywhere she applied. Including Harvard.

The second lesson about the personal statement is also the punch line of the joke about the tourist who stopped a longhaired, artsy-looking fellow on the street for directions to Carnegie Hall. Tourist: "Pardon me, sir, but do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?" Answer: "Practice, practice, practice." The ARCO guide tells a story of a student spending forty hours on his personal statement; Kaplan tells you to allow at least three months to write it, doing a draft and then letting some weeks go by. Better advice was never given. If you turn in your personal statement hot off the computer, unless you have a perfect LSAT, you're a ditz and you shouldn't be going to law school anyway.

As you struggle to bring your personal statement into line with the elementary rules of good writing, which, for some of you, will be a first, don't make particularly female mistakes either. Don't talk about your personal or emotional life, family, sexual or parenting relationships. Clara Too told us nothing of how her father reacted to her struggles with the decision to go to law school. Don't think the reader is interested in you because you're you. No one ever described inner feelings better than the playwright John Guare: They are "banal, sordid and of interest only to myself." Don't use words as a substitute for substance. Don't boast. Notice that Clara Too didn't tell us how well she did on the LSAT Don't pretend to talk like a lawyer (remember how stupid those cops sounded on the stand in the O. J. Simpson trial; they have been taught since time out of mind to try to sound like the legal system they enforce). Clara Too's story has a respectful distance even from the new law graduates who worked in the judge's chambers. Don't tell how you're going to save the planet. Note that Clara's story says nothing about how she's going to use her legal education to change the law and pro vide assistants for every judge in America, laudable as this goal would be. The only change I'd make is to give it a more interesting first line.

Strategy Just Be There

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned the importance of an early start. Even if you're not going right to law school after college, it pays to start thinking about the picture you present before all your college courses are chosen and the grades in. Regardless of when in your life path you apply, you're better off statistically with your application in the stream early in the fall before you want to enroll than later. The LSAC official guide has all the addresses and phone numbers, most law schools have Web pages, and the LSAC sells a CD-ROM with all the applications on it.

The Waiting List Game

All the guidebooks say to get an early start, but there's also an important strategy that people don't know about-the late start. I know a woman lawyer in her fifties who is about to retire from her job as general counsel of a major American corporation with enough money from stock options, pensions, etc., to spend the rest of her life at the beach. When she got out of college in 1966, she screwed around for a year. Her LSAT score and college grades were good but not great, and she hadn't applied anywhere. She showed up in Chicago a couple of days before the fall quarter began at the prestigious University of Chicago Law School in 1967, and popped in to the dean of admissions, a wild and crazy guy named Nicholas Fee, with tuition (I think at that time it was $3,000) in her purse. Why not? Fee put another chair at the end of the row of students in the first-year class, added $3,000 in tuition money to the budget of the law school, and three years later, she graduated somewhere in the middle of her class. Thirty years later, she's about to end a successful career and go live somewhere in the South of France. What do you call the person who graduates last in medical school? Doctor!!

The odds are not with you on my friend's strategy, but it does illustrate the value of pure unadulterated chutzpah or nerve. Which brings me to the subject of the waiting list and the related subject of the transfer. Most law schools have a waiting list, where they put applicants they'd be glad to have but who definitely come in second compared to the ones they've already accepted. Until they know how many of their first-choice group have accepted, they want to keep the second list to pick from. If you're accepted at a less desirable school and on the waiting list where you'd rather go, you're going to have to put down the not insubstantial deposit where you're accepted and sit tight. Ms. Thin Skin was accepted at a good school and asked to wait at her first choice. Although she was ultimately accepted, she decided to attend the lesser school. "If they don't want me," she said, "I won't be happy there." After graduating, she spent several years striving to put herself in the place where opportunities were as good as they would have been if she hadn't been so thin-skinned. Law school is not about love.

If you're on the waiting list, one thing law schools are looking for is how sincere you are about going there if they take you. This is where I think some influence may actually work, because you know you're minimally qualified and very few schools go to the enormous trouble of ranking the waiting list. As we know, the incomparable Ms. Marginal was on the waiting list at her first- choice school when she resorted to calling her friend's husband to phone the dean. If you know people on the faculty or influential alumni and they can put in a word without being obnoxious, this seems like the time. Other strategies for getting off the waiting list include writing the admissions office to tell them of your accomplishments while waiting, like a really great spring semester senior year or a work achievement that makes your work-based personal statement more compelling. If you can, you might try the last- ditch strategy of just showing up on opening day in case someone broke a leg.

Finally, you can always apply to transfer. If you get into choice two and you do brilliantly your first year, there isn't a first-choice school in the country that won't consider a transfer. Why shouldn't they? Now they're not speculating on how you will do in law school; you have a proven record. Your existing school will probably try to keep you, and this is a great time to negotiate for more scholarship money, but don't stay out of love. Remember, in law school, love means. . . . And don't be proud. What do they call someone who graduates after only two years at Harvard Law School? A Harvard grad.

Law school is funny. Sometimes people with really great grades from college don't do as well their first year and others do a lot better than expected. Ms. Marginal only got in off the waiting list. But her first-year grades were so good she got onto the prestigious law journal at her school without even having to go through the writing contest. As she said when interviewed, "I've probably got the lowest grades of anyone who graded onto the law review." What do they call someone who just squeaked onto the law review? Law review editor.