Every school offers tax law, wills, criminal procedure. If it didn't offer these "Bar Exam" subjects, it would lose its accreditation in short order. But what about the "non-Bar subjects," as one school called them? Does the school offer comparative law, immigration law, AIDS law? And more importantly, if it does, what are your chances of getting into the class? Many of you have learned as undergrads that if a school offers exactly as many seats as it needs, you often don't get your first -- or even second -- choice of classes.
In order to guarantee that students have a reasonable chance of getting what they want, there have to be quite a few extra seats. How many? I don't know, but I arbitrarily picked a number of 1.5 seats per student taking electives per class. (If you really care what that means, click here.)
Since the ABA data on which I based this calculation gave separate figures for clinical and simulation courses, and since applicants are constantly asking me about litigation specialties, I calculated litigation seats separately from seminar seats, as well as the combined total. As usual, I did a lot of math that hardly anybody cares about, and stuck it in a separate file, so that the three other people in the U.S. who do care can review it. I made a lot of assumptions, assigned a lot of definitions, and crunched a lot of numbers. And here are the Top 25 law schools for course selection in three categories.
| Simulation and Clinical Classes |
Small Lectures and Seminars |
Total Non-Core Electives |
|
| 1 | Baylor | Whittier | Baylor |
| 2 | Mercer | Mercer | Mercer |
| 3 | SUNY Buffalo | J. Marshall (GA) | J. Marshall (GA) |
| 4 | Pepperdine | SUNY Buffalo | SUNY Buffalo |
| 5 | J. Marshall (GA) | Toledo | Whittier |
| 6 | Cal. Western | Baylor | William & Mary |
| 7 | William & Mary | St. Thomas (MN) | Toledo |
| 8 | Maryland | Wisconsin | Maryland |
| 9 | Illinois | William & Mary | Wisconsin |
| 10 | Wake Forest | Arizona | Case Western |
| 11 | North Carolina | Case Western | Franklin Pierce |
| 12 | Nova Southeastern | Hawaii | Pepperdine |
| 13 | Akron | Creighton | Illinois |
| 14 | Idaho | Franklin Pierce | St. Thomas (MN) |
| 15 | Brigham Young | Nevada | Arizona |
| 16 | Southern Illinois | Maryland | Wake Forest |
| 17 | Valparaiso | George Mason | Tennessee |
| 18 | Wash. U. (St. Louis) | Tennessee | Creighton |
| 19 | Wisconsin | Ohio Northern | Akron |
| 20 | William Mitchell | Golden Gate | Penn State |
| 21 | Franklin Pierce | Campbell | Hamline |
| 22 | Case Western | North Dakota | Cal. Western |
| 23 | UC Davis | Penn State | Hawaii |
| 24 | Penn State | Stanford | Golden Gate |
| 25 | Hamline | Hamline | Stanford |
As is usual when I put up a chart like this, I expect that a lot of people will disagree, because the results aren't what you expected. But here's all the background you need to understand how I got these results. You can also click here to see the results for all law schools, in alphabetical order.