For me, one of my main motivators for a legal career is intertwined with several personal religious beliefs. I do plan on applying to several schools with religious affiliations, but also to a few state/public schools as well. I know that part of being ABA accredited is not discriminating in admissions based on religion but would it hurt my application in any way to include this reasoning in my personal statement?
I can see how it would strengthen the application for a school with a religious affiliation, but not sure if it goes vice versa. I know I also probably shouldn't leave out some of my main reasons for wanting to pursue law, but I could potentially reframe it to be more universal for public universities if I needed.
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I suppose it depends on the motivational reasons you have. I will soon be a part-time pastor in a rural area and want law school so I can be a lawyer in a rural county without any. This is the crux of my personal statement for both religious and secular schools and has been met positively all around.
there's a really good harvard/yale admissions podcast episode about a personal statement revolving around the applicant's relationship to catholicism you can take perspective from
@ionicinstinct oh that sounds like it would be very helpful, do you have a link to that?
@HunkyMunky I can't RN but look up the episode "getting personal with personal statements" it should be one of them
From what I’ve heard, it can actually help your application. As long as it isn’t anything crazy that would be offensive or whatever you should be fine. Everyone has their own motivations for why they want to go to law school. If the reason you want to go to law school is your religion, then why go to a law school that wouldn’t accept you due to it? I just wouldn’t want to be somewhere where they don’t fully accept me, especially when there are places that do.
While admitting that I'm coming at this from the perspective of my work experience at a religious affiliated school (Notre Dame Law), I'd still encourage you to be yourself. There are two ways to look at this:
1) If your reasons for wanting to go to law school are directly tied in with matters of faith, it could be too difficult to separate that out for the public law schools that you're applying to. And to the admissions officers reading your app, it may seem like there's a missing piece somewhere. Rather than helping them out by being non-religious, you may be hindering them by coming off a bit odd.
2) Let's go down the road where your personal statement does offend someone and they don't offer you admission based on that. While that's disappointing, I'd also flip that around. If you were direct/honest/respectful/yourself on your personal statement and they didn't like that, well, I'm guessing that that wouldn't have been a good fit for you for your three years of law school, right? You deserve to go somewhere where you can be yourself in full!
I think that if you are above the medians for non religious schools they might want to protect their yield since your motivations are religious and thus less likely to accept their offers. I changed my PS and perspective statement for non religious schools.