Law Schools, Reader Polls

The Decision: Harvard v. Yale -- An ATL Debate

Grab yourself a drink, make yourself some popcorn, and sit back, as Elie and I argue against our respective alma maters. And then, at the end, cast your vote in our reader poll....

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DAVID LAT

For purposes of today’s debate, I am going to take the role of the anti-YLS person. Please note that I’m a huge fan of Yale Law School, and I’m glad I went there. Elie and I just decided it would be more interesting to argue against our alma maters.

If 180 Problems wanted to be a law professor, I’d tell him to go to Yale. Yes, you can obviously make it into legal academia after graduating from any number of law schools. But if you look at the data on this subject, collected by Professor Brian Leiter and others, you’ll see that YLS is unmatched when it comes to producing academics. Yes, part of this might be a selection issue; academically oriented people go to Yale because it has a reputation for producing academics. But still, you can’t go wrong by going to Yale if you want to be a law prof. I think about a third of my classmates are now professors, which is an extremely high percentage.

What if you want to do something other than teach? In that case, the choice becomes a lot tougher — and, honestly, a lot more subjective and personal. As many observers have pointed out, this is one problem with the U.S. News law school rankings. Even though choosing a law school is a personal decision that should turn on a variety factors that will vary from individual to individual, the rankings reduce it all to a formula, quite literally, and then rank 150 law schools in numerical order (followed by the unranked “second tier” schools — please note that there is no longer a “third tier” or a “fourth tier”).

In the case of 180 Problems, I think he should go to Harvard Law because, quite honestly, it’s what his gut instinct is telling him to do. You don’t need to read between the lines of his message; he clearly wants to go to HLS, partly for personal reasons (like his desire to be in Cambridge), and he just wants to be told he’s not making a huge mistake. I hereby tell 180 Problems: you’re not making a huge mistake. Provided that you’ve done your research, as 180 Problems clearly has (reflected in his reaching out to us and our audience), then going with your gut is often a good idea.

(I offer similar advice to people choosing between law firms. Some choices are obvious: if you want to do M&A work, choose Wachtell over Finnegan; if you want to do IP work, choose Finnegan over Wachtell. But once you enter the realm of close calls, you should feel free to listen to your instincts and consider such subjective factors as how a place and its people make you feel.)

To make this debate more interesting, though, I will note that many of 180’s pro-Harvard observations are valid. Harvard is just… so… BIG. And let’s face it: size matters. I don’t want to sound like too much of a size queen, but when it comes to legal education, bigger is often better (and not just because the Cooley Law School Rankings say so).

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As a larger school, HLS has a wider range of resources. It has more, more, more: more faculty members, more course offerings, more student activities, and definitely more square footage (apparently the entire Sterling Law Building can fit inside Harvard’s stunning new Wasserstein Hall complex. If you don’t have a clear sense of what you want to do with your legal career — which is the case for 180 Problems, who said he just wants to keep as many doors open as possible for now — then there’s a lot to be said for going to a vast school with vast offerings in a vast range of fields.

This brings me to my next point in favor of Harvard: it is more of a law school than Yale, which could be described as a “law mixed in with theory and a bunch of other disciplines” school. I get the sense that if you actually want to learn The Law, especially in a black-letter sense, HLS is a better place than YLS. I’m not saying that Harvard Law is BAR/BRI; in fact, some of my friends who graduated from HLS complain that it too is overly theoretical these days. But it cannot be disputed that, because of the size of its faculty, Harvard can provide better coverage of the many different areas of substantive law. This extends to the basic as well as the esoteric. Even though Yale came up with a good solution for the problem in the end, a situation like Adminlawgate would never have arisen at Harvard in the first place.

One caveat: the case for Harvard was stronger before it enacted grade reform. Elena Kagan was a great dean, but moving away from Harvard’s old-school, rigorous grading system, which happened under her watch, was a mistake. Being badass and ruthlessly competitive was part of the Harvard brand; when the school lost its grading system, it lost a big part of what made it unique. Most of the HLS alumni I know, especially those who are involved in hiring, believe that Harvard was better off when it had “real” grades.

Anyway, despite grade reform, I still think there’s a good case to be made for picking Harvard Law over Yale. Honestly, here’s the most annoying thing about turning down YLS for HLS: for the rest of your life, you’ll have to tell people, “I got into Yale Law but turned it down.”

And, on that note, I yield the floor to Elie Mystal (who got into Yale but turned it down). Read what Elie has to say, and then vote in our reader poll….

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