Something for 1Ls to Keep in Mind:
Via Tony Mauro, we learn something that might interest the law students in the VC readership: The first-year law school grades of Harvard Law School Dean (and SG nominee) Elena Kagan. First-year students who are assuming that their 1L grades will determine everything might be interested to know that in her first semester at Harvard, Kagan earned a B in criminal law and a B- in torts. She then recovered in the spring, earning mostly straight A's with one A-, and she went on to clerk for the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court; to become a tenured professor at Chicago and Harvard; and then to become Harvard's very popular Dean and now likely will be the Justice Department's top Supreme Court lawyer. So much for first-semester grades as destiny.
Of course, Kagan has already had the ultimate revenge for a law student who received a B- in torts: She became the Dean of the law school and pushed through grading reform that abolished letter grades.
Of course, Kagan has already had the ultimate revenge for a law student who received a B- in torts: She became the Dean of the law school and pushed through grading reform that abolished letter grades.
Call me crazy, but I'll bet she'd have done just fine even with a slew of B minuses. After all, the degree would still read "J.D. Harvard Law School." How many judges on the D.C. Circuit (much less the Supreme Court) would reject a Harvard grad with a B minus average in favor of someone from the University of [Second Tier Law School] with an A plus average??
She managed to recover and have a great career, but I'm not going to be catering a pity party for any other HLS grads with a B average.
All of them.
I wouldn't go quite that far. But I got an A+ in tax and a B- in evidence, when any rational evaluation of my knowledge and skills would have reversed those.
This realization led to cynicism and ennui, and thus to me drinking all night and starting to write the answer to my 24-hour take-home-final in Laws of War at about 5:00 a.m., 4 hours before it was due, and thus to my writing an essay suggesting that the best way to deal with genocide is to nuke the genocides, an answer which earned that law school's equivalent of an F: a B-.
That made me laugh, until I realized that it dropped me by a ridiculously small percentage down one notch in honors. Which probably cost me real money. Hence, more ennui and drinking. I have cured myself, however, of the all-nighters and have not, as of yet, suggested nuking someone in an opposition to a summary judgment motion.
I consistently wrote well under the word limits and average length of my peers' exam answers in law school (I write slowly and refused laptop computer options) and earned better grades than almost everyone in my class. Substance counts.
Come to think of it, if we wanted life to be more pleasant all around, maybe we should encourage everybody to drink a bit more.
My experience was somewhat similar to yours. On exams with no word limit, I was rarely in the top range. Alternatively, on exams with limits (especially low ones, like the Bar Exam), I performed much better. I vehemently oppose essay exams with no word limit, but then I don't think the average law school class engages in proper testing anyway.
Not to mention that things have changed just a touch in the law world since 1986.
I'm reminded of all the now-Biglaw Partners from T3/T4 schools who get trotted out to demonstrate how the school's Grads can make it big. Perhaps that was true for the Class of 1975. These days, that Biglaw firm won't even recruit there.
Still don't know what "formula" the quick graders were expecting, but it doesn't much matter now. Maybe they really did throw the tests down the stairs and grade based on where they landed. I don't think there were enough hours in the day to actually read all the exams as quickly as they supposedly did.
I work at a small boutique insurance bad faith firm. We always go up against Big Law. And we rarely lose to them, and make more than they do while being home by 5:15 every night.
Yes, I suppose only Harvard grads could be the SG, anyway. (Just ignore the current SG, who went to GW. )
My first year of law school resulted in literally one of every possible grade from A (Con Law) to C (Property) with no repeats. My overall GPA was about 2.9 and I was in almost the exact middle of the class (Con Law was one semester, as was my A- class, Criminal Law, so my overall GPA was lowered because my higher grades were weighted against full-year courses).
My second year, I was in the top 10% of my class for each semester. My third year I slacked off a bit but, overall, I still graduated somewhere between the top 15% and top 20% of my class overall.
Of course, because of my mediocre first-year grades, BigLaw ignored me. So from the perspective of getting a high-paying job, yes, the first year does matter. However, in retrospect I am glad they did ignore me, since I actually have a life beyond finding ways to bill 2000 hours a year.
I should note that I did spend my first year of law school working 30 hours a week (even though I was not supposed to) because I had a family to feed and bills to pay. That MIGHT have caused a lower grade in some subjects, though I doubt it.
By the way, I had one professor whose exams were nothing but True/False, composed of interesting fact patterns and then questions designed to see if we actually did understand the concept. I thought his exams were both challenging and fair--and never felt his grades were either arbitrary or capricious (of course, the fact I never received less than an A- from him probably colors my perspective).
The appropriate question is how many of those firms hire new graduates.
These threads always make me question whether or not I made the right choice going to a large second tier state school where I got a scholarship and will graduate law school with basically no debt, or going to one of the top 20 schools I got accepted to and would have graduated with near six figures of debt.
I had top grades, and I consider myself lucky to have a job in my local market earning less than half of what an Am100 firm pays new associates. Had that job fallen through I'd have considered myself lucky to have a job paying a quarter of what they pay. Very few if any of the large firms actually recruit here, and as far as I'm aware I can count our graduates going to positions at firms like that on two hands.
I think you are seriously overestimating the scrutiny that will be paid to her hearing, much less to the peculiar proposition that because Dean Kagan got a B and B- in her first semester of law school, she abolished grades when she became dean.
Given the scrutiny that Eric Holder and Dawn Johnsen are going to receive, Dean Kagan will sail through, quite possibly unopposed.
I have never heard of students getting SCOTUS with B's and B-'s
It hasn't come up during your weekly roundtable discussions with Supreme Court Justices and their law clerks?
This post reminded me how the relevance of first-semester grades and the ancillary credentials they bring (e.g., law review) wasn't lost on Ted St. Antoine, at the time the Dean Emeritus at Michigan Law, when I had the privilege of being in the first 1L class he'd taught in many, many years. As first-semester exams approached, he noticed that the students seemed more than a wee bit stressed out. One morning he gave us an impassioned speech about the evils of worrying too much about grades, that culminated with the memorable phrase "I wouldn't let half the Law Review probate the will of my dog!"
(then again, although he talked the talk, one could quibble about whether St. Antoine walked the walk on this issue. Legend had it that when he was himself a student at U. Mich. Law, he was class valdictorian AND winner of the moot court competition AND EIC of the Law Review -- and most importantly for someone who would go on to a distinguished career in union-side labor law, a member in good standing of "The Barristers," the law school drinking club).
I had a professor who required students to sign up for a day to bring food to class. I actually baked three different styles of pecan pie, figuring my small class would never eat all three pies. They didn't - there was about a third of a pie left in each tin.
But my professor took all the leftovers. I was mad - until I got my grade at the end of the semester. After talking to some other students, we basically came to the conclusion that whether or not the professor liked your food made a full letter grade difference.
Unfortunately (for me, at least) this was a 3L fluff class and not Civ Pro or Business Associations.
Perhaps things were different back in the golden ole days. Otherwise, query how many fed clerks/judges, overwhelmed with clerkship applications, take a look at the name of the school on the application envelopes and simply toss them out of hand.
I have never spoken to a Supreme Court Justice, but it did come up in my daily discussions with HLR editors back in my days at HLS.
i bet for every elana kagan with poor frist sem grades and good grades after there are 100 people with stories like the poster "blah" above..who had poor grades first semester and impeccable credentails afterward-but becuase of his/her first sem grades (despite them all being based on one test) is considered a probable "slow learner" or simply bested by those with a better all around gpa-which can never recover really from being slammed in 1 semester.
they do not determine what kind of lawyer you will be, your capacity for caring about a client, you knowledge of yourself, and what to do when it's just you, your poor client, and the law up against the judge, the powerful state or company, and the jury, and your client is clinging to you for dear life. None of these "tests" can speak to that, and the sooner a law student realizes that, the sooner he can become a real lawyer, not some robotic cog in the wheel.
Though my own history is pretty strong evidence about the lack of destiny. Got good grades in the first year (not quite HLR) then consistently fell off. Correctly theorized that pretty good first year grades would get me into nearly any law firm I wanted and figured that the very top was only necessary if you wanted to be a law professor, which I was sure at the time that I didn't.
So after practice, I decided I wanted to be a professor. While the grades kept me from an immediate entry job at a top law school, I figured out a plan and got what I wanted. First year grades are certainly not destiny.
You asked:
I spent a year ad MediumLaw defending bad faith cases learning the ropes before I got this type of job. Also, like you I went to a second-tier state school and left wih little debt.
You know what's funny, I could tell halfway through the first year who would wind up and BigLaw and for the most part I was correct. It ain't all its's cracked up to be. One can easily make a nice living in law if they are willing to hustle up and make their own way.
There was a time when decent people did the right thing and used a shotgun for dental treatment when they got only one A- and now we have a woman nominated for high office with not only multiple A-'s but a B and a B-. What is this world coming to?
I think someone should tell Joe Biden, because I'm sure that he didn't get to his high office with any A-'s at Harvard law school.
So what you're saying is that because of your first year grades, you did not go to BIGLAW (where you would otherwise have gone), and wound up with an entirely diffeent sort of life, which which you are happy.
Explain again how first year grades do not determine your destiny?
Maybe the very, very top firms (think Wachtell or Cravath) don't recruit at lower-ranked schools (maybe they do, I don't really know), but I know for a fact that many Amlaw 100 firms recruit there. I worked for a very large firm (usually around 20th in the Amlaw rankings) when I came out of law school, and my firm recruited everywhere from Yale to Widener (of course, you had to do a lot better at Widener than at Yale to get serious consideration). I once heard that the informal cut-offs were top 50% at a top 10 school, top 25% at a top 50 school and top 5% anywhere below that.
All that said, as others have noted, anyone who has a healthy appetite for doing something other than billing hours (e.g., seeing your spouse, going to museums, watching TV, exercising, sleeping, etc.) really should avoid Biglaw firms. You will hate working there, trust me.
This may sound silly, but I think the reason Kagan did terribly in the first semester, and incredibly in the second semester, is that she didn't smoke during the first semester. Really. I never put this together before, because I didn't know how poorly she did first semester, but it now seems clear to me that Kagan's problem was that she picked a bad time to stop smoking -- just like Obama picked a bad time to stop smoking, at the start of the presidential campaign, and apparently fell off the wagon during it.
Even by the mid-80s it wasn't considered particularly cool in Ivy League grad school circles for people to smoke, and smokers were pitied, even ridiculed. I remember seeing a couple section mates smoking at the start of law school, but not Kagan. She didn't seem particularly animated; maybe she even was depressed.
Then, after grades came out, during the second semester Kagan smoked like a chimney -- literally chain smoking at all hours of the day. I'm sure if you check with others who were in our class, they'll confirm that Kagan was perhaps the most notorious chain-smoker on the campus.
It seemed weird to me at the time: why would someone in her mid 20s just decide to take up not just smoking, but chain smoking?
Now it seems pretty clear what the deal was. At some point shortly before law school started, Kagan stopped smoking, figuring if she was ever going to quit, it had to be before the stress of law school began -- and that she'd look pretty blue collar at a place like Harvard if she was still smoking in law school.
But she had been so addicted for so long (I suppose she started as a teen?) that she was effectively brain-dead during the first semester, unable to think that the high level which had enabled her to gain admission to Harvard Law.
Looks to me that after her grades came out, she realized that to salvage a decent legal career she would need to go back to chain-smoking. She did, got back to her old self, and got awesome grades. She certainly was more outspoken in class, and generally more upbeat, when she was chainsmoking, so it makes sense that the smoking could have had that much of an impact on her grades -- the difference was so stark as to lead me to suspect that the smoking could be a remedy for an underlying mental condition (I've read that manic-depressives often self-medicate with smoking or drinking, not that I have any information that she currently has any problem).
So that's my theory: Elena Kagan's legal career took off when she took up chain smoking in the second semester of law school. That anecdote, plus Obama's smoking habit throughout law school, might figure in some future cigaratte company ad!
I'll reserve for a later post -- if at all -- my gripe about the suspicious circumstances under which Kagan got on to the Law Review through the week-long writing competition at the start of second year, while I didn't. As for falling just short of Law Review on grades, even if you could have guaranteed me I'd make Law Review if I'd taken up smoking, I wouldn't have done it.
I wonder whether Kagan will think it was worth it if she develops lung cancer in her 50s. Thinking about that possibility, I hate to sound so clinical, but isn't the smoking thing a negative in terms of whether Kagan's a good candidate for appointment to the Supreme Court?
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