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those commonly available to all law school graduates a few years ago. Harvard each year receives between 6,000 and 7,000 applications for a class of 550. At Yale and Stanford the disparities are even more dramatic: 3,000 applicants for only 165 spaces.
    In making their selections, admissions officers generally place the greatest weight on two factors—the student’s college grades and his score on the LSAT. The emphasis on those criteria is often criticized. Because of variations from college to college in academic standards, law schools tend to favor applicants from undergraduate schools whose marks have proved reliable in the past. At law schools like Harvard, that means a continued influx from the Ivy League colleges, with candidates from smaller and lesser-known schools at a disadvantage. The sole leveler is the LSAT—the only measure common to all applicants—but its accuracy is often doubted. The test is administered in a session which lasts only four hours, and many persons question the fairness of allowing the results of so short an exam to be so crucial. A grade below the median of 500 makes it difficult to get in at most American law schools, and each year many college students who have long planned on a legal career must change objectives when the LSAT results come back.
    Admissions officers, however, discount the failings of grades and test scores and point instead to their utility in speeding the selection process and also in foretelling law school success. By now the average grades and test scores of those admitted to the most selective schools have hit astronomical levels. In recent years, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago, the entering class has boasted medians near a solid A average and LSAT scores of around 720, close to the ninety-eighth percentile among all those taking the test nationally.
    No matter what criteria were used, though, my guess would be that most of my HLS classmates would have arrived there or someplace similar anyway. They had been jumping hurdles all their lives, impressing teachers and counsellors and admissions officers, leading, succeeding, achieving. There were moments when I wished for greater diversity in the group. Nearly a third were from Ivy League colleges—and it was hard not to notice how many of my classmates were plainly the children of privilege and wealth, now acquiring more of the advantages they had started with. But those observations applied just as well to me—eastern-educated, a son of the well-to-do—and if advantages became a basis for exclusion then I might well have been the first to go. As it was, there were many moments during those initial days when, awed by the geniality and talents of my classmates, I felt proud, and sometimes startled, that I had been included at all.

    9/3/75 (near midnight)
    Tried tonight to read a case for the first time. It is harder than hell.
    When I started, I thought the Legal Methods assignment would be easy. The memo from the boss was straightforward. A man named Jack Katz is “our firm’s” client. Katz, who had worked for years as the comptroller of a company that makes raincoats, was fired a few months ago by the president of the corporation. His name is Elliot Grueman and he is the son of the man, now dead, who hired Katz ages ago. Grueman and Katz differed about expansion plans for the company; when Katz carried his objections to a member of the board of directors, Grueman showed Katz the door.
    The memo from the boss indicates that Katz probably doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It looks like Grueman had every right to fire him since Katz did not have an employment contract. But still, the boss says, read this New Hampshire case, Monge v. Beege Rubber Company , which may indicate some limitations in an employer’s right to discharge a worker.
    OK. It was nine o’clock when I started reading. The case is four pages long and at 10:35 I finally finished. It was something