Tom Smith (San Diego Law) delivers another laugh-out-loud zinger to his alma mater, Yale Law School (see his earlier one here), via this edited version of their admissions site:

“Our unmatched faculty-to-student ratio allows us to offer a vast array of courses [on whatever goofy topic in which a professor wants to indulge himself that semester], with an average class size of under 20 students [often way under]. Easy student-faculty interaction is a hallmark of the school [especially easy for the professors, who interact with students only when they feel like it]; students enjoy countless opportunities for research and writing with professors [up to and including unattributed co-authorship]….

“At the same time, Yale Law School has ties to the city of New Haven, a small, lively [think Law and Order] urban [and we mean urban] center with several first-rate museums [a real life cast of characters straight from The Sopranos,] and the best pizza in America. [Students going out for pizza after dark should travel in groups or have significant experience in close quarter combat.]”

Given that all of the preceding is fairly accurate, the mystery remains: why does Yale Law School have such a lock on the prospective law students with the strongest academic credentials? Hardly anyone turns down admission to Yale Law School. In the 1980s, I was told the year I visited at Yale (98-99), 60% of those admitted to Yale and Harvard chose Yale, while the remainder went to Harvard. Now, apparently, much more like 80% go to Yale, 20% to Harvard. A decade of U.S. News ranking Yale 1st, and Harvard as low as 5th, and often 3rd., can not have helped. Yet there are still plenty of years in U.S. News when Harvard’s academic reputation is stronger than Yale’s, and almost every year, Harvard’s reputation among lawyers and judges is stronger than Yale’s. (To quote a distinguished U.S. Court of Appeals judge who was providing a recommendation for one of his clerks: “He was a very good clerk, despite having gone to Yale Law School.”)

Yale has a very strong faculty from a scholarly point of view–but it simply isn’t that much stronger than several other schools, and it is decidedly inferior in various areas than an even larger number of other top law schools.

So why the lock? ‘Tis a mystery, is it not?

UPDATE: One reader notes, surely correctly, that the absence of real grades at Yale Law School must surely be an important factor in its appeal. Tom Smith: what say you? (FURTHER UPDATE: Professor Smith comments in an update to his original post here.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader writes at greater length on the same point:

“I am a 2003 Yale Law School graduate, and a fan of your blog. Watching you demolish the intelligent design folks and other right-wing yahoos is a guilty pleasure, and your writing on the academy is always a breath of fresh air.

“Anyhow, I think you are missing the key element in the appeal of YLS to prospective students. It’s the grades, stupid! By getting into YLS, you no longer bear the downside risk of doing badly in law school. There are no grades at all in the first semester, and afterwards nothing more than the famously opaque system of “honors” and “passes.” Despite the fact that they don’t really know what they’re getting, almost all big-name employers, and many judges, are willing to hire YLS grades on the basis of these ridiculously sparse transcripts. So you can enter law school knowing that no matter how badly you do you will be in exactly the same position as if you had done very well at Harvard, Stanford, or Chicago. Who would pass on that deal?

“Actually, my sense is that if you manage to graduate at the very top of your class at another top-tier school, you are probably in a better position than any
Yale graduate (excepting perhaps some Rhodes Scholars or others whose pre-law-school distinction set them apart as exceptional). But most people looking at law schools aren’t willing to bet that they will end up on top.

“None of this suggests that a Yale legal education is substantially better than the education one would receive at another good school, although one does get
particularly good training in dealing with self-important personalities.”