How Important are Professors to Law School Choice? Forum

[Hordfest]

As the title suggests I want to get some thoughts on how important professors were to your decision making with regards to choosing a law school. Also, for those of you who have completed or are in law school, do you wish you would have put more (or less) weight into this category? How much of an impact can a quality well-connected professor have on making your legal career?

Obviously I'm not suggesting that a single professor at a T50 school is going to push you into attending a school like that over a T13. However, if law is like other academic fields, then I imagine that there are well known professors in legal academia that could really give you a boost towards certain career paths based on relationships they have, and that might be a tie breaker between similarly ranked schools with comparable scholarships.

tl;dr: Should I be investing the time into really learning about professors and their reputation at the law schools I'm interested in, or is that time better spent on other things?

[nixy]

Other things.

1) many many profs are immersed in academia and while they can still be helpful, they’re not really a direct source of jobs for most people.

2) you can’t guarantee that you will actually get to work with a given prof during your JD. They may go on leave, they may get a job elsewhere, they may never fit in your schedule. Or you do poorly in their class or they’re just a jerk who doesn’t help students. You will develop relationships with profs who will help you, you just can’t really guarantee ahead of time which profs that will be.

3) unless you’re aiming for academia, law school isn’t like academia - the strength of the school overall is more important than working with specific professors.

Mayyyyybe if literally everything else is equal, you could consider this. But I wouldn’t weight it heavily.

[IPProf]

Agree with the above. I’d only place weight on single faculty if you’re aiming for academia.

General quality and accessibility of faculty is important, as is depth if course offerings in niche areas you care about, but you shouldn’t go to Stanford just because Lemley is cool.

[Hordfest]

Thanks for the feedback. There is definitely a different mentality than History grad school where working with specific professors is a big part of the game, but it makes sense why that is. Law school is ultimately a professional school whereas History grad school is mostly an academic endeavor by nature to prep you for a PhD pursuit. I'll save my time and worry about other things!

[nixy]

Yeah, I came to law school having been conditioned by how history PhD programs work, but it’s just entirely different. Without going on and on, one of the biggest things is that a PhD program is very customized/personalized and it’s on you to craft the right experience for your research agenda. In law school you just need to fulfill requirements and then fill up three years with classes - it’s absolutely a generalist degree. (It’s even often better to take a wide range of general stuff so you can sell yourself to a wide variety of employers.) I’d also argue that the non-classroom experiences you get in law school (internships, jobs, and clinics, though this is truer of non-school employers) do more to shape the kind of law you’ll practice than anything profs teach you.

[QContinuum]

Yeah, I came to law school having been conditioned by how history PhD programs work, but it’s just entirely different. Without going on and on, one of the biggest things is that a PhD program is very customized/personalized and it’s on you to craft the right experience for your research agenda. In law school you just need to fulfill requirements and then fill up three years with classes - it’s absolutely a generalist degree. (It’s even often better to take a wide range of general stuff so you can sell yourself to a wide variety of employers.) I’d also argue that the non-classroom experiences you get in law school (internships, jobs, and clinics, though this is truer of non-school employers) do more to shape the kind of law you’ll practice than anything profs teach you.

This is entirely correct. Ph.D. programs are more akin to apprenticeships. The school formally grants your degree, but you really "apprentice" under a particular professor (or, sometimes, two professors) to do your research, and it's that work - in conjunction with your professor's reputation and connections - that really counts. You spend most of your time teaching and researching, not taking classes, and your GPA barely matters. J.D. programs are closer in terms of structure to college than graduate school. You spend almost all of your time taking classes, and your GPA is king. You may do some research during law school, but it'll be a very minor part of your experience and its importance pales into near insignificance next to your GPA.

[Hordfest]

This is entirely correct. Ph.D. programs are more akin to apprenticeships. The school formally grants your degree, but you really "apprentice" under a particular professor (or, sometimes, two professors) to do your research, and it's that work - in conjunction with your professor's reputation and connections - that really counts. You spend most of your time teaching and researching, not taking classes, and your GPA barely matters. J.D. programs are closer in terms of structure to college than graduate school. You spend almost all of your time taking classes, and your GPA is king. You may do some research during law school, but it'll be a very minor part of your experience and its importance pales into near insignificance next to your GPA.

So that raises another question then. Outside of 1L are there "must take" classes that really look good, or does class choice really not matter? Like if I take some odd elective law class that interests me but is really out there, will that hurt me or will it not matter at all outside of the letter grade attached to it?

[nixy]

It almost never matters - the grade attached is what’s important. There are a couple of caveats: some federal judges will want to see Fed Courts or may not like to see lots of “law and [squishy subject]” seminars on a transcript. But that’s pretty idiosyncratic (I clerked and never took Fed Courts for instance). If you apply to PD/DA offices they tend to like to see the black-letter criminal stuff (evidence, crim pro), but that’s in part because they’re going to throw you into court as soon as possible. But I now practice in an area in which I took almost no coursework in school (though I had a couple of pertinent internships and clerking helped).

I would say that the only exception - and this is relatively uncommon - is if you have a burning passion for a specific area of law, you’re certain it’s the only thing you want to do, and ideally you have substantive work experience in that field already to back up your passion. I went to a school with a lot of environmental law people who were all in on only working in environmental law. Admittedly that didn’t work out for everyone, but if you’re someone who has a MS in environmental science, you worked in the field for a few years, and know the JD is an extension of what you’ve already been doing, there’s logic behind filling your schedule with every environmental and environmental-related course there is (as well as doing environmental internships and journal note if you do a journal). But you have to be pretty sure you want to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s usually safer to take a wider range of stuff (and a lot of the more generic classes are relevant to lots of practice areas).

[Mullens]

Lower ranked schools often require you to take classes for topics that appear on the bar exam (like evidence) but otherwise, no you can take whatever you want. Not a bad idea to take a few classes in the area of law you want to practice after you graduate though, both for the actual subject matter expertise and to show your interest to employers.

[QContinuum]

So that raises another question then. Outside of 1L are there "must take" classes that really look good, or does class choice really not matter? Like if I take some odd elective law class that interests me but is really out there, will that hurt me or will it not matter at all outside of the letter grade attached to it?

I'd actually encourage folks to take odd elective law classes. You might end up discovering a passion for a legal area/subfield you'd never previously even considered.

On the flip side, I actually do think that most of the bar subjects are important and helpful to take, except for Wills, Trusts & Estates (unless you actually want to do T&E work). I think most everyone, for example, would benefit from taking Conflict of Laws, Corporations, Evidence, and Secured Transactions. I also think Family Law is helpful - not professionally (unless you actually want to be a divorce lawyer), but because that's the single context in which most people encounter the legal system, and you might as well not be completely clueless about prenups, postnups, property distribution, etc.

There are a few other "core" black-letter subjects that tend to be perennially popular, like Administrative Law, Antitrust, and Federal Tax. But I don't think either Admin or Antitrust are "must takes." I do think Federal Tax is helpful.

[nixy]

And suggestions for classes to take are always going to be subjective to some extent. For instance, I would advise everyone to take Admin Law and don’t agree that all the others referenced are necessary. But I’m fairly anti- bar courses.

[Hordfest]

Hmmm. I currently work as a regulatory compliance officer at a credit union and i see myself staying in compliance or admonistrative law in some capacity. Right now my main goal is actually to end up in the environmental side of compliance eventually although admittedly I don't have the science credentials. (Funny that you used environmental as your example nixy!) I am fully aware that environmental law might not be possible right out of law school though and I'm open to considering other paths as needed and would explore those through interesting classes presumably.