Last week was one of the busiest of the admissions cycle—August LSAT scores released! Applications opening on September 1st! An immediate transition into a holiday weekend so you couldn’t contact admissions offices about the new questions on their applications! Clearly, the late-August Super Blue Moon worked its dark magic! So now that the dust has settled a smidge, let’s do our weekly check-in on the law school admissions landscape to see what’s up and what we have to look forward to in the coming days.

More Post-SFFA Adjustments

We had an early sneak preview about a month ago of how schools would approach their applications in a post-SFFA world. With most schools’ apps opening over the holiday weekend, it seems like our initial thoughts were reasonably on point.

At one end of the spectrum are schools that have changed very little. For example, Berkeley Law has rebranded their diversity statement as a Perspectives and Experiences Statement. However, the actual prompt is exactly the same as it was previously. The only change—beyond the title—is that Berkeley now allows students to submit up to 500 words while they had previously requested students to keep themselves to 350 words or less. From this, one can conclude that the Berkeley admissions team felt that the prompt served them well but that it would perhaps be best to avoid the word “Diversity” in the subject line.

Other schools have just tweaked matters a smidge. For example, Notre Dame Law School has kept the explanatory section of their Different Kind of Lawyer Statement. They still ask students to reflect on an open letter their dean wrote to the community after George Floyd’s murder. But they’ve changed their reflection questions just a touch. 

The previous questions were:

1) What is the unique voice you will lend to the class? How will you expand your classmates’ circles and improve their education because of your presence in the class?
2) What do you hope to achieve either in law school or through your professional work that will further the cause of justice?

Now, the questions are:

1) What experiences, hardships, or adversity have you faced that have shaped your perspective on law and justice?
2) How has your own “circle,” culture, and community inspired you, your morals and ethics?

We see a direct echo of Chief Justice Roberts’ note from the eighth page of the SFFA syllabus that “[N]othing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” But, this is also remarkably similar to the previous prompts which ask about voice, community, and justice. There are then the schools that have added significantly to their applications. For example, Washington University in St. Louis has added an entirely new section—Section 9: Experiences, Perspectives, Skills & Character Qualities. They then ask a series of questions related to:

  • Skills, character, and perspectives rooted in the student’s life experiences.
  • Their sexual orientation and gender identity.
  • Physical or mental disabilities or medical experiences that have shaped the student’s life.
  • Their religious faith.
  • Their socio-economic status.
  • Languages the student may speak.
  • And a student’s military experience and veteran’s status.

Rather than ask for statements that may be attached to the application as PDFs, WashULaw instead provides character-limited text boxes. For example, their optional response for a student’s unique skill set, character qualities, or perspectives is limited to 500 characters. That’s roughly the same number of characters used for the introductory paragraph of this blog entry! Or 1,400 characters fewer than Michigan Law takes to describe their personal statement! So it appears that brevity will be the name of the game when working on this particular application.

When discussing new questions and ways to approach the post-SFFA world, we should also come back to Berkeley. While they kept their diversity statement prompt the same, they did add a new optional question to their application that has echoes of Columbia Law’s video response. In their new “Interest in the Legal Profession” question, students may submit either a 500-word statement or a video of up to four minutes in length that relates to a few questions about their interest in the legal profession. Is this a direct response to SFFA? On the surface, no. None of the prompts ask about lived experiences or diversity writ large. The closest any of the prompts get to such subjects is when the fourth prompt asks how the student sees themself “contributing to or advancing the public good as a lawyer.” Admittedly, this isn’t even that close to matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, much like the larger kerfuffle regarding the initial rollout of Columbia Law’s video prompt (which we covered midway in this blog entry) this could be a way to circumvent the lack of racial “checkboxes” by simply watching a student’s response. It could also be a sincere attempt to see how students present themselves because US News and World Report have now significantly increased the weight in their rankings for employment outcomes. By removing blanket consideration of race as a category for analysis on an application, the Supreme Court has encouraged schools to treat the application process more like an interview.

And just to make sure we leave our audience on a lighter note, we should also mention that Georgetown has updated their optional responses. While the top-ten list and one-minute video remain, the first four prompts are new:

1) What’s the best (or worst) piece of advice you ever received?
2) If you could “uninvent” one thing, what would it be?
3) Tell us about a moment in your life that you regret?
4) Describe your perfect day.

We applaud every applicant who combines these answers into a multipiece prog rock-esque conglomeration wherein their perfect day is when they uninvent their previously written diversity statements, because someone had given them the supposedly “good” advice of starting their law school applications material over the summer. Regrets were shared by all parties.

Law Fairs and On-Campus Recruitment Events

The big law fair events for the week of September 11 focus on Oklahoma and Texas!

September 12—University of Oklahoma
September 13—University of Dallas
September 14—Texas Tech University
September 15—Baylor University

While further information may be found on each university’s website, this is part of a larger coordinated circuit of law fairs organized by the Southwest Association of Pre-Law Advisors (SWAPLA) and is called the “SWAPLA Swing” or “SWAPLA Caravan.” They even have a website for it with a roadrunner logo! These are the little things that get law school AdComms excited—“Oh, I wonder where the SWAPLA Caravan is going this year?!”

Additionally and in non-roadrunner-affiliated news, LSAC will host their first digital Forum on September 14, with an exclusive focus on LLM candidates.

Please remember to utilize LSAC’s Calendar of Recruitment Events to see a comprehensive list of upcoming fairs.

On the on-campus front, schools are ramping up their own events. Of particular note:

  • Yale Law continues their dean’s office hours on Friday the 8th.
  • Stanford and Chicago Law will have their next “Dive in with the Admissions Deans” event on September 11.
  • Penn Law’s next AMA is on September 12.
  • Michigan Law will host sessions most Wednesdays during the Eastern time zone lunch hour. Coming up this week is a general Q&A.

Remember that we’re doing our best to track all events on our website here.