Wumbo wrote:I never said anything about personal attacks. Ad hominem is simply trying to undermine an opponent's argument by appealing to personal characteristics as opposed to the substance of my argument, and insofar as your LSAT tutor comment was an attempt to undermine my argument, it was ad hominem. Insofar as it wasn't intended at that, it was simply an irrelevant comment.
I believe you misunderstand what "ad hominem" means. The term's definition is "an argument directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining," i.e., a personal attack. I never suggested there was anything wrong with wanting to become an LSAT tutor.
Wumbo wrote:As for strawmen, that just means misrepresenting my argument and attacking the misrepresented version as opposed to my actual argument. Perhaps this is on me for being unclear, but so many of your comments (including basically all of your bullet points) have nothing to do with the points I'm making.
It's difficult to engage with you in this discussion, because you keep shifting the goalposts. To name just one example: You attacked the use of clerkship placement to compare law schools, arguing that not every student wants to clerk. Then you turned right around and proposed using CEO placement to compare law schools, despite the fact that
far, far fewer HLS/YLS students want to become CEOs than want to clerk.
You also continuously misrepresent my assertions re: Harvard's prestige. I have never asserted that Harvard Law is not prestigious. Of course Harvard Law is prestigious. My assertion is simply that,
from the POV of anyone in a position to hire a HLS/YLS graduate, Harvard Law is less prestigious than Yale Law. To counter this, you conflate lay prestige and professional prestige, and conflate Harvard Law with Harvard College/Harvard University as a whole. You cite the layperson on the street in a foreign country. You cite nonlawyers in the US. You even cite a list of movies with fictional lawyers who attended Harvard! All of these people, you say, would fall all over themselves upon hearing the Harvard name. But is the layperson on the street really impressed by the "Law" part of Harvard Law, or the "Harvard" part of Harvard Law? I assure you the layperson on the street would be similarly impressed by someone claiming to be a Harvard-trained veterinarian. The layperson would have no clue that Harvard hasn't had a veterinary school since 1901.
The layperson, in comparing Harvard Law with Yale Law, wouldn't really be comparing the respective law schools. The layperson, by definition, lacks any field-specific knowledge. The layperson would compare Harvard Law and Yale Law simply by comparing the reputation of Harvard as a whole with that of Yale as a whole (and both institutions' reputations are largely based on their respective undergraduate Colleges). I do not dispute that the layperson on the street would consider Harvard a more prestigious brand than Yale - but such a layperson would not be in a position to hire a HLS/YLS graduate.
Wumbo wrote:None of these combat my points, and few even engage with them. Your previous position on prestige was that HLS was basically only prestigious in people's minds because of their confusion with "Harvard College," which, as my examples show, is obviously not the case. The fact that Legally Blonde was written by a Stanford Law grad and was going to be "filmed" on Uchicago (it wasn't filmed at HLS, either, btw, they just wanted to use the name) is a red herring, since (a) it doesn't strengthen your college prestige point, and (b) my point was both about interest in and exposure to the school, and the film taking place at HLS is a strong example of the latter, regardless of how it got made (not to mention the fact that you just glossed over the other 3 examples, each of which alone individually demonstrates my point).
The Legally Blonde trivia is relevant because it indicates that even Harvard's lay prestige isn't as dominant as you imply. If the layperson on the street would fail to be impressed by any name other than Harvard, the filmmakers wouldn't have planned on making Elle a Stanford Law student or a Chicago Law student before settling on Harvard as their third choice.
What were your other three examples? That Fortune 500 companies allegedly prefer to hire HLS grads over YLS grads? That the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections turned on Obama being a HLS alum, instead of a YLS alum? That the electorate prefers to elect HLS grads over YLS grads? (Do you not realize that with the country's current elite-bashing mood, a politician from Big State U would probably have the edge over a Harvard grad?) These are not "examples"; they more resemble completely uncorroborated, pie-in-the-sky assertions.
Wumbo wrote:If you want to now argue that HLS is prestigious but that it "doesn't matter", then that's fine, but acknowledge that you're making a different point.
That completely misrepresents my previous posts. My assertion is that
lay prestige doesn't matter, not that
prestige period doesn't matter. I have consistently pointed out in my posts throughout TLS that the legal industry is one of the most prestige-driven industries out there. Law school prestige is critically important. And Yale beats Harvard on the law school prestige front.
Wumbo wrote:Also, the CEO metric is relevant because, as I explained in a previous post, it's a good proxy for business careers generally (that is, if a school has CEOs it's more likely to have more execs in general).
CEOs positions are so rare and becoming a CEO requires so much luck that using CEO placement to extrapolate to corporate hiring more generally is likely to be completely off base more often than not.
Wumbo wrote:Also, especially since most big companies are multinational now, they are in fact more likely to hire HLS grads than YLS grads, for the same reason that they are more likely to hire HBS grads than YBS grads (also, because of the greater alumni network, the HLS grad is more likely to know someone in the company)
Companies are more likely to hire HBS grads than Yale SOM grads because HBS is a better business school. The inverse is true of HLS and YLS.
Multinational companies still hire employees separately in each country they operate in. A Fortune 500 company hiring for a U.S. position won't care about the prestige perceptions of the layperson on the street in Eastern Europe.
Wumbo wrote:I definitely never said most law students were aspiring entrepreneurs
When did I ever assert that you claimed most law students were aspiring entrepreneurs?
Wumbo wrote:, though you make a good point that may in fact change my mind. I said earlier that I don't know enough about Yale's LRAP to comment, but if it's the case that it's significantly better for students than LIPP if they want to go certain non traditional routes (I do know several friends doing or planning on doing JD-advantage jobs that would seem to contradict that quote, but it's certainly possible that the options are more restricted than YLS), then I would actually concede that Yale offers better downside protection than HLS, and potentially change my overall prescription, as well.
You don't need to take my word for it - I included links to the relevant docs in my previous post.