Fifteen law schools dominate when it comes to landing graduates the country’s most prestigious jobs. While some say such elitism is justified, others argue that it benefits the wealthy at the expense of meritocracy.
(By Michelle Weyenberg and Jack Crittenden)
Let’s go back in time for a minute.
Law school as we know it today started when Harvard Law appointed Christopher Langdell as dean in 1870.
Harvard Law School had been founded in 1817 and was considered the best of the 30 law schools in the U.S. at the time. But Langdell introduced the case method of instruction and the now-standard first-year curriculum of Contracts, Property, Torts, Criminal Law and Civil Procedure.
By 1900 the number of law schools had grown to 100, and almost all had adopted Langdell’s case method, modeling themselves after Harvard Law.
That led to a period when Harvard Law dominated the legal landscape, and anyone with a connection to the school was considered to have a leg up, said Stephen Presser, professor emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and author of the book, “Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law.”
Consider this: Prior to 1900, only four Supreme Court justices had been alumni of Harvard Law School. From 1900 to 1950, the law school produced 19% of Supreme Court justices. And from 1951 to the present, 36% of the justices have been Harvard Law alumni.
Harvard is not the only law school to see its prestige rise in recent years. But it is in a small pool. Prior to 1975, Supreme Court justices hailed from 25 law schools. Since then, only six law schools have produced a Supreme Court justice: Harvard Law (8); Yale Law School (4); Columbia Law School (1); Stanford University Law School (1); Northwestern Law (1); and Notre Dame Law School (1).
The numbers for federal judges are just as telling. Harvard Law dominates, with 79 current judges who are alumni, followed by Yale Law with 60. Then there is a large drop to third place: University of Texas School of Law has 23 alumni serving on the federal bench. Only 21 law schools have 10 or more federal judges as alumni.
Large law firm hiring follows a similar pattern. The largest firms hire 42% of their new attorneys from just 20 law schools.
And what about law professors? Of law professors hired in the past 10 years, 204 were graduates of Yale Law and 163 hailed from Harvard Law, accounting for 33.7% of all profs hired. New York University School of Law came in third with 104, followed by Stanford Law with 66. Only 18 schools have 10 or more alumni from these schools who are law professors.
Almost half of all law schools have no alumni who were hired as law professors in the past 10 years.
The National Jurist crunched the numbers to identify the law schools that place the most alumni in prestigious legal jobs: lawyers at large firms; federal judges and clerks; and law professors.
The results show that 11 of the traditionally top 14 law schools make our list, with University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law and Yale Law as the top three. Vanderbilt University Law School, University of Texas School of Law and Notre Dame Law School join our top 14, moving down Cornell Law School, Columbia Law School and Georgetown University Law Center, which rank No. 15, 16 and 17 respectively.
So, the same law schools, with a few exceptions, continue to dominate when it comes to the most prestigious legal professions.
The justification for elitism
Is it elitism?
“Of course it’s elitism, but it’s justified,” said Presser, a graduate of Harvard Law. “Law firms want an objective indicator. But the legal profession, from the word go, has been an elitist institution based on merit and qualities that you can measure, appreciate, understand and replicate.”
Alexander ”Sasha” Volokh is an associate professor Emory University School of Law and author of The Volokh Conspiracy blog. He said the hiring processes for law firms, federal clerkships and professors all focus on quality. The precise type of quality is different but correlated.
“Prestige does not just come out of the blue,” said Volokh who also graduated from Harvard Law. “In some way, [the law schools] earned that prestige. I don’t see that as an indictment of any system. But they’ve done the work to attract those candidates.”
But quantitative research has shown that the current hiring models make little economic sense.
“At law firms, you are hiring people who don’t really want to work at a high-stakes, professional services organization,” said William Henderson, a professor at Indiana University Mauer School of Law – Bloomington who has studied law firm recruitment. “You get a bunch of people who go [to the firm] because it pays well. But their heart is not in it.”
That leads to high attrition, something every large law firm deals with. But the attrition is higher among graduates of elite law schools.
“It is because the ponds get overfished,” Henderson said.
The good news is that the legal profession may be heading for change.
“It is on a collision course with diversity,” Henderson said. “You can’t have numerical preferences, but you also can’t let your firm become a lot whiter. The only way out is to expand the schools that you hire from.”
Henderson said the elite schools simply do not enroll enough minorities to fill employer needs.
In 2003, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in Gruter v. Bollinger, explained why diversity at law schools is so important.
“Universities, and in particular, law schools, represent the training ground for a large number of our Nation’s leaders. . . . Individuals with law degrees occupy roughly half the state governorships, more than half the seats in the United States Senate and more than a third of the seats in the United States House of Representatives.”
In June, the Supreme Court overturned the Gruter decision, which had allowed schools to consider race as part of their admission process. That has shifted the debate on bias away from race to socioeconomic status. Many now see legacy and donor admissions as the new battleground. Studies show that such practices overwhelmingly favor wealthy and White applicants.
And while law schools are more racially diverse than they were when Gruter was decided, they remain overwhelmingly upper-middle class — especially the most elite schools.
According to a 2011 study by Richard Sander titled “Class in American Legal Education,” only 5% of students at elite law schools come from families who fall on the bottom half of the socioeconomic spectrum. (Sander, a professor at UCLA School of Law School, earned his law degree from Northwestern University.)
Critics say this means hiring practices that favor the elite law schools are inadvertently perpetuating class and diversity bias in government, the legal profession and politics. That, they argue, is a problem that needs to be fixed.
“The students who attend top-tier law schools are overwhelmingly representative of the elite socioeconomic class, oftentimes as a result of merely being born to parents who were also a member of that class,” wrote Michael Higdon in a 2013 article titled “Law Faculty Hiring and Socioeconomic Bias.”
Higdon, a professor at University of Tennessee College of Law, graduated from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law.
“As such,” he continued, “hiring faculty members from primarily those ranks undermines a law school’s ability to achieve socioeconomic diversity on its faculty and instead helps perpetuate a class-based monopoly within the legal academy to the detriment of all involved.”
The same has been said about hiring associates at law firms and federal law clerks. Hiring from a small number of elite schools perpetuates a class-based monopoly that stifles legal education, leads to unfairness in American society, and will likely not be sustainable long term.
But it is hard to change a model, especially one built on elitism.
[Editor’s Note: Read Part 2 Law firm elitism here; Part 3 Elitism among federal clerks and judges here; Part 4 Elitism in hiring law professors here; The 20 Most Prestigious Law Schools here]
