Legal Career Success: Factoring Status, Eliteness, and Grades

Richard Sander and Jane Bambauer explore the importance of social class, law school eliteness, and law school grades in their recent article, The Secret of My Success: How Status, Eliteness, and School Performance Shape Legal Careers in the December issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. The authors note that although social class (and religion), along with law school eliteness once played a crucial role in determining legal career success, these two factors are not necessarily decisive today.  The authors also propose that, despite what some legal scholars and law school deans have stated to the contrary, law school performance does seem to matter. Readers are left with this encouraging conclusion: “The very good news is this: “who you are” has declined in importance as determinant of legal careers, and “what you do” matters more. What students show they can do in law school – at all law schools – is very closely linked to both their short-term and long-term career success.”