But the big difference is the left is not calling for bloody revolution. They’re just calling for like a fraction of what Western Europe has in terms of social safety net and environmental laws. The left pretty much wants to make things better for everyone except billionaires. The right wants to crush their enemies into dust and end democracy.
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Of the 10 or so HLS grads I know, almost all are middle class strivers. It’s not like you can just get good grades at Georgetown prep academy and be admitted. You need a 3.5+ (more like 3.8) over 4 years of college and a 97%+ LSAT. There aren’t many Jared Kushners in the mix.
I genuinely doubt more than 25% of Reagent university grads could pass the CA bar.
Yeah you can get into undergrad as a failson but it’s much harder to get into an elite law school as a total fraud. Of course there is heavy correlation with high income families but it’s more like tons of top students from like Lake Forest or Greenwich than it is oligarchs’ kids.
Law School is kind of egalitarian in that way. It doesn’t almost doesn’t matter where you did undergrad. Get a ~4.0 and 175+ LSAT and you should be a near lock for HLS. Yale is a bit tougher.
I see what you’re saying, but I think the main issue I have with it is that brilliance is way overrated when it comes to most things in the legal profession, including being a good judge/Justice.
I’d agree with you on that. There is a somewhat irrational part of me that really wants the judges of our highest courts to be smart AF. However, I must admit that it’s really not necessary at all.
In my experience the most important skill for a litigator is to truly not give a fuck about what anyone thinks of you, the exact opposite of everyone that goes to elite law schools.
I’m not talking about HLS graduates being total frauds, I’m talking about them being all from very similar worldviews and backgrounds. I’ve known a handful of people that Simp probably would consider middle-class strivers that went to elite grad schools, and they are all very similar, privileged white kids. I’d rather have a judge that struggled to make it into a middle tier school because of their life experiences than some “striver” who was pushed by his parents/surroundings toward academic perfection and ladder climbing at the cost of everything else.
Yeah, litigation rewards sociopathy and being an all around horrible human more than most other things, I think.
We agree, but I would push back a little by noting Sotomayor and KBJ bring that perspective (arguably) despite having attended those elite schools.
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My YT feed is full of Heard hate and love for Johnny. Watched a few and they make her look like a psycho.
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Well just because someone went to a middle tier school doesn’t mean they’re a striver. Some of the privileged failsons go there. I’m sure you’re aware.
What about someone who truly struggled and got into Stanford Law or whatever. There must be some. Are they damaged goods now because their struggle happened to be more successful than the striver who could only go as far as Regent? I guess you could say it is worse because the environment of an elite law school just develops a different type of lawyer than the environment of Regent. Is that what you’re saying?
Yeah, definitely. I have no idea how they would quantify it, but I’d really like to see some analysis on the ratio of people like Sotomayor HLS produces versus the people like DeSantis. My instinct is that the ratio is skewed way in favor of Desantises over Sotomayor.
I’d go the other way. Among other reasons, I think the people who run the place are trying to pump out more of the latter than the former.
What they probably pump out the most of is shitlibs.
Yeah, and the distinction I’m trying to make re: the dangers/harm that top-teir law grads pose is not along liberal/conservative. I don’t really know how to articulate it, but it’s more along the lines of people that have seen the ugly side of society and those who haven’t (whether willfully or just by happenstance).
Thanks (or no thanks) to this tangent I have spent some quality time on the Regent Law website watching vids and perusing various other promotional materials they have got on there. Those kids really don’t strike me as the type that have seen the “ugly side of society” at all. But that could just be Regent specifically and not other similar tier law schools.
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I agree, that’s why I’d originally tried to make the point that their harm was different than the harm posed by the HLS crowd.
Talk about saying the quiet part out loud
https://twitter.com/baelalayla/status/1527826868455473154?s=21&t=s0ovPKLVr4ZrnB4ycg7K7g
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Most of the people I know who went to Harvard law were definitely well behaved middle to upper middle class HS and college students who were smart and didn’t party much. Though one was a vegan high school dropout who had attended community college, another (daughter of a successful So. Cal. PI attorney, the wealthiest HLS grad I know personally) wrote a thesis on the constitutional right to get high and now does drug defense criminal law, another graduated Harvard undergrad at 20, was a top big law partner, and would later be the subject of a sexual harassment settlement by the firm, another a firmly middle class Hillary type who would tut tut people people doing drugs (whose dad went to prison for sexually assaulting a teenager while his daughter was in college), another a very smart Clinton admin flack with Dr parents who grew up on the same street as John Rawls, another a very sharp Princeton philosophy grad. and good big law litigator, another (now a law prof at a t14 and former Garland clerk) grew up very middle class with a single mom who was a real estate broker (lawyer dad died in small plane crash when he was young). Your typical cross section of humanity, though strongly skewed to smart people who play by the rules. None grew up poor.
The people I know who went to bottom tier schools generally skew toward more convivial ex athlete types and ex-partiers, but thats probably more a function of people I happen to know.
I do think there’s a difference between people from the northeast and elsewhere when it comes to prep school and higher Ed. Coming from CA, there are few “elite” private schools and the ivy league is a far off thing. I get the sense that the elite education culture on the east coast is more insular than the rest of the country. Everyone knows people who went to “fancy” private schools it seems.