They charge about the same as Harvard, Yale and Stanford. And they're nowhere in the same league.
Actually, I think Harvard and Yale are a cancer on the legal community. They pretty much have a monopoly on prestigious clerkships, and, more and more, on federal judgeships as well.
The result: you get totally unqualified legal “intellectuals” like Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court who has virtually no experience as a practicing lawyer—she was a junior associate for less than two years. But she had the Harvard Law mafia backing her, and another deficient Harvard Law graduate nominate her for the court.
Contrast her to Harriet Miers, who had a sterling resume as a top lawyer and litigator nationally, was the managing partner of a large law firm, the president of the Texas bar, and headed major committees of the ABA. Yet Bush was forced to withdraw her name because she only went to law school at SMU, and was therefore deemed unqualified to serve on the top court.
I would suggest you can get just as good a legal education at W&L as you can at Harvard and Yale. What you won’t get is the connections that get you the best jobs, whether you have talent or are a moron.
“They charge about the same as Harvard, Yale and Stanford. And they’re nowhere in the same league.”
I know nothing about W&L law school, but I have been intimately involved with the US News Ranking system, as a member of the board of a college that is consistently in the top 10 of the rankings.
We played the game, but the methodology is so stupid I am not even sure where to begin to talk about it. Most notably, it skews results to the NE and California (which helped the particular school I am involved with) due to how people are polled.
It then skews results due to past history, in effect, building on past errors.
Probably the most reliable rankings are the ones that poll top employers (for any college or grad school) and see who they like to hire.
While I was not on the board for our school’s law school (and am not a lawyer — thank God!), I do recall the staff being much more impressed with National Law Journal rankings of schools.
They is some rough overlap with US News, but not nearly as much as you would think. And the big ones (Yale, Harvard, Stanford) drop down below a lot of state schools that actually produce better lawyers.