One might generously think that Warren’s coming from a lesser-ranked school isn’t necessarily an indictment of her ability.
That said, knowing Harvard’s propensity for hiring pedigreed academics, it’s very hard to think she was so exceptional that she was hired for anything except her claimed ethnic heritage. She is the worst sort of hypocritical scum—a liberal who supports affirmative action and then cynically lies to take advantage of it.
By the time she was hired by Harvard, she was already a tenured professor at another Ivy League law school (UPenn). So, even though she did not graduate from a top law school, she did have something of an academic pedigree by the time HLS hired her.