Ideally, you'd like to know a lot of things before you choose among the 175 or so law schools in the U.S. that are now approved by the ABA. You might have only the vaguest idea of where and what you'd like to do as a lawyer. You could use a good source of information at this point.
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Let's suppose, for instance, that you'd like to practice law in California. It would be helpful to know how much you might make as a lawyer in San Francisco or Los Angeles. And then you'd like to compare this California information against comparable data for, say, New York. It's one thing to decide between Manhattan and Malibu. But for all you know at this point, the wrong law school might have you choosing, instead, between Buffalo and Bakersfield. You'd like to know this kind of thing before committing to a particular school.
It could also make a difference in your planning if you could learn more about being a lawyer in your target place. Is there active discrimination, in that city or state, against lawyers of your ethnic group, race, religion, or sex, by the bar association, by law firms, or by judges? On the other hand, do any of your favorite law schools have strong local alumni networks that might help you get a job?
There are other kinds of information that would be helpful to you at this point. For instance, it would be nice to have a chart that lets you go down a column entitled "Annual salary," until you reach the number that appeals to you, and then look across to the column for the city and the size of firm that interest you, and see how many hours you'll work to make that much money in that city. It could also be helpful to know how many years the typical graduate of each law school stays in his/her first law job, or how much s/he makes there, and how many graduates of each school have become partner in top firms or judges in important courts.
Not to mention the bar exam. You might wonder how many people from each law school fail it the first time, and of those who fail, how many never pass it, so that they've effectively wasted their three years in law school. And you might want to know how much law school will cost, how much you'll have to borrow, and how long it will take to repay.
In short, if you were choosing among law schools according to whether they met your personal needs, you'd expect to be able to go down to the bookstore and pick up a book that contains a lot of data on questions like these.
But surprise, surprise! This is not how most law students go about deciding which law school to attend. It can't be, because there's no such book. In fact, even the raw data that you'd need to answer those questions isn't always published, and in some cases it's never even been collected.
So now we have two unanswered questions: What makes people suddenly become so sure that they want to go to law school, and how do they know which law school they want to go to? And, come to think of it, there's a third question: Why doesn't the bookstore stock a book that answers these practical questions about your legal future?
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Nor are lawyers reluctant to ask questions. On the contrary, they're bright. They're driven. Even at this pre-law stage, you'd think that these students, of all people, would insist on knowing exactly what's going to happen to them in this hard, expensive process of legal education.
So how can it be that many people who enter law school know less about what they're getting than when they go out to buy a new car? You have to assume that they believe they have enough information to make their career decisions. How can they be so smart, know so little, and feel that they have the knowledge they need, all at the same time?
There is an answer. The answer is that all this information doesn't matter.
The Way You Really Choose a School
If you were going after a Ph.D. in philosophy, you'd know that one graduate school is very different from another. Unless you loved the kind of specialized work that they were doing at a particular school, you wouldn't fit in, and they probably wouldn't like you very much.
That's not how it is in law school. The ABA-approved schools all meet the same requirements, and the graduates all have to work in the same legal system, so you're a lot more likely to be studying exactly what you would have studied at some other school.
Since the schools are so similar, the choice of school might seem irrelevant. I mean, if you're destined to be at the bottom of your law school class, then no doubt you belong at a place like Harvard, whose fame will make it much easier for you to rest on your laurels. Otherwise, though, you have lots of highly comparable schools to choose among, and you'll work hard and learn a lot at any of them:
And that's why you care which school you get into. We agree: The schools really are similar. But that's not important. What's important is that your peers, your employers, and you yourself are going to believe that you're a cut above the crowd if you graduate from a big image school. Everyone goes to the "best" - i.e., the most prestigious - school they can, and therefore they assume that you're doing likewise. So if you go to a "loser" school, they think that's where you belong.
So no one cares about all those factual questions I was asking a moment ago. For most entering law students, the real question about a school is not whether it will give you a better education, but where it stands on the pecking order. And since a lot of people take that order so seriously, here are the top 20, according to one widely published survey
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