Although we've seen that there are many issues for women in thinking about law school-nontraditional career aspirations, unresolved work/family pressures, text anxiety-nothing is as central choosing a school where you can succeed. That's why you want to read each catalog closely and ask good questions when you visit. Choosing a law school where women succeed doesn't guarantee a good outcome, but it certainly raises the odds. This article includes a ranking of 158 of the accredited American law schools, according to how women students succeed there This ranking comes from a survey and analysis I did in 1995, with these criteria in mind: I looked at the male/female numbers in the top twenty status schools using making law review as my measuring rod. I chose law review as my test, because, although law review reflects a broader population than Guinier's top 10 percent, it's a measure of success according to the terms of the law school world itself. At that time, I found that men made law review in greater numbers than their class percentage-and thus outperformed their female classmates-at thirteen of the twenty highest-status schools.
Looking at the classes of 1996 and 1997 at all the accredited law schools, the picture continues to be perilous for women. Men outperformed their female counterparts, making law review in greater numbers than their representation in the class, in approximately 60 percent of the schools I looked at. Women did less well, outperforming their numbers in the class at only 40 percent. So the bad news is women don't do as well as men at most law schools regardless of the school's status. The good news is: There are lots of exceptions to the rule.
Until Lani Guinier and others started looking at the data, everyone assumed that women and men did about the same in law school. Even after Guinier s study, people were very slow to notice that women's fates differed from one law school to another. A handful of concerned faculty or administrators looked at their own schools; the schools that publicized their findings were mostly places where women succeed, published in the law review literature, not a place where a lot of potential students browse around.
The ranking in this guide are mostly based on information I gathered from the public record alone, as well as my own interviews. I figured out how many academic female faculty each law school employed by interpreting their catalogs. Here and there, where a catalog was not informative or where I couldn't get the school to send me one, I resorted to the listing and biographies in the American Association of Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers. The numbers probably aren't perfect, but I did analyze the biographies to eliminate the routine overcounting of women by including low-paid impermanent or nonacademic faculty members, like writing teachers and visitors. The percentage of female students in the full-time (usually day) classes of the 158 schools comes from The Official Guide to Approved Law Schools published by the American Bar Association.
Finding out what percentage of the women in those classes made law review was harder, but, I think, worth the effort. It's a dirty little secret that law school performs a very significant sorting function between the students who get most of the benefits the law schools have to offer and the rest. The line isn't drawn at making it to the middle of the class. The line is drawn a little higher than that, around the top third or fourth. And making law review is a rough but ready measure of whether women are going to make it into the privileged group. Remember the uncharacteristically frank professor at the University of Chicago who told his class: "Most of the goodies around here go to twenty percent of the class. The other eighty percent spend the next two years licking their psychic wounds." During the years I studied, the University of Chicago was not one of the schools where women made it into the privileged group very often. Although some women choose not to go on law review, regardless of whether women earned grades on average as good as men in the class, in 1996 and 1997, the men at Chicago made law review at three times the rate that the women did, leaving a lot of Chicago women "licking their psychic wounds." I thought you'd like to know that.
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Although very few schools would share their students' grade point averages, fortunately, the law reviews are published documents, and they include mastheads listing their members that can be roughly broken down male and female. This rough process can't account for people with nongendered names, but, for the first time since women started attending law school in serious numbers, this article series tells women law students roughly where women make law review and where they don't. If you don't think that difference matters, just skip this article and spend your money on a place with a nice building or sociable students.
Finally, the legal honorary society, the Order of the Coif, publishes an occasional version of its membership list, which roughly reflects the breakdown of the top 10 percent of the senior class in those schools with Coif chapters (about half of our survey). With this last piece in place, our ranking was complete.
A WOMAN'S GLIDE TO LAW SCHOOL
Why You Should Know Whether Women Succeed
People who don't want to compete for your tuition dollars will say that all law students are the same and that it's whiny or special pleading for women to want to know how other women are doing at the various schools. A law student is a law student, they would say. Truth is, women as an average had grades almost as good as men did in law school.
But that's as good as it gets. I'd like you to do better than average. A year ago, the Legal Times newspaper carried the story of the Georgetown Law Center's reluctance when one of their female students tried to find out whether their school had the same disappointing record as Penn. Unable to get the administration to produce the data, Georgetown's Heather Marsh went to her law school library and found out that the Georgetown class of 1996 graduated with twice as many men as women in the top 10 percent and the next class was disproportionately male down to the top 30 percent. That failure occurred among women usually without children to care for or other distractions from academic life, and it occurred in one short year. And it's not just Georgetown. Women made up 44 percent of the classes of 1996 and 1997 at law schools nationwide, but they only made law review in proportion to or in excess of their numbers in the class at 66 of the 158 law schools I examined.
The Femscore Rankings
The law schools are first grouped by a rough marker of status- the median entering class LSAT from 1995 (these are the scores for the graduating class of '98). There are fifteen status groups, with several schools in each group. Group #1, the highest status group, consists of such schools as Yale and Stanford, with median LSATs for the class of'98 of 166 or higher. The second group includes schools with LSATs between 162 and 165. After that, each group represents one point lower on the LSAT scale, Group #3 at 164, Group #4 at 163, and so forth. The lowest-ranking status group includes the schools with LSATs of under 150. Within each status group, I'm going to tell you how likely women are to succeed.
Once you see your LSAT score, you will know which group is likely to include the schools where you will be admitted (assuming your college grades aren't wildly out of line with your LSATs). This ranking will enable you to select the most women- friendly school within that group of schools. If you do better or worse than you hoped in the admissions process, just look at the next group up or down.
This ranking is a change from the other major rankings, not only because this ranking focuses on women, but also because it links status and satisfaction. U.S. News & World Report ranks for status alone. The National Jurist studies student satisfaction, and the Princeton Review studies of selectivity and "quality of life" separate the two. Even the National Jurist 1995 study, the "Best Law Schools for Women," didn't rank by status. According to the National Jurist, North Carolina Central came out first and Harvard next to last.
We're not looking for pure pleasure or pure status. This article series is trying to help you to succeed, which is a combination of the power of the institution plus your individual likelihood of putting the institution's power to work for you. So even though the most women-friendly law school in the country is Southern or California Western, according to our criteria, I'm not recommending that you go there if you get into Yale or even to spend your money applying there just because they are more women-friendly. The power of the institution is not limited to its status, but includes the effectiveness of the placement office, its geographically privileged status with regard to desirable employers, and other factors. This article is designed to help you target your applications to the most women- friendly law schools with the advantages you need to launch your professional career.
The indicators of women's success for the Femscore ranking include the following:
- Percentage of women tenured or tenure-track academic faculty in catalogs of 1997-98.
- Percentage of women in the full-time student body (average of classes of 1996 and 1997).
- 1996-97 success rate: percentage of women on the high- status, general-subject-matter law review as a percentage of women in eligible full-time classes of 1996 and 1997.
- Femscore: A sum of A, B, and C, which weights C (law review success rate) most heavily.
- The percentage of women in the 1995 chapter of the Order of the Coif, where applicable.
- 1995 Coif success rate: percentage of women in 1995 Coif as percentage of average of women in law school nationally in 1995 (42 percent).
Those factors include all the data that are publicly available. And, in light of the law schools' unwillingness to reveal their students' success rates, public data were all that was available. But here's why they matter.
PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN ACADEMIC FACULTY
For this study of all law schools, I used the figure of 25 percent to test for correlation between women faculty and women success, because women are about 25 percent of the legal profession, so a faculty that falls below that number is presumptively suspect.
In this study of all law schools, law schools where women students succeeded again had above average numbers of female faculty. Of the sixty-six schools where women made law review at rates at or above their presence in the class (that is, at 100 percent or above), 54 percent had faculties with 25 percent or more women on them. Of the ninety-two schools where women did not score well, only 39 percent had faculties with 25 percent or more women on them.
In calculating the faculty numbers, I don't count anyone entirely or mostly teaching writing skills or clinical or other legal practice, because, for good or ill, law schools see themselves as providing an education for a learned profession, and academics count for more than skills in shaping or dominating most institutional cultures. Where the biographies were ambiguous about whether the person was an academic faculty with an occasional course in legal writing or a legal writing teacher with an occasional traditional academic course, I did my best to figure out what was flying. Inevitably, there will be some mistakes. Nor did I include librarians, administrators, visitors, adjuncts, or emeritus professors. Although I regret adding to the impression of second-class citizenship for the many accomplished, well-regarded, and hardworking academics in these categories, I'm focusing on the people who dominate the world you are about to enter. A lot of law school is about dominance. Many times, legal writing teachers or clinicians are not tenured or not eligible for tenure, they often don't vote on appointments, or teach mandatory first- year classes and they are almost always paid less well on average.
People have speculated for some time about whether the presence of faculty who resemble minority or excluded groups makes a difference in the students' performance, and no one has a definitive answer. More women on the faculty definitely correlates to more courses about women's interests. In the interviews for this article series, many of the women students spoke about how meaningful a particular woman teacher had been for them-Chris Littleton at UCLA, Mary Becker at the University of Chicago. But many students found their women faculty to be no better or different than the men, and one well-known antifeminist came in for warm praise from one of her students for her support in the student's original research.
I'm not going to try to resolve that dispute. The numbers from the 1995 study indicated that something was going on and the high correlation between female student success and large numbers of female faculty in this article series about the classes of '96 and '97 at 158 accredited law schools replicates that result. My suspicion is that an institution whose academic faculty is way below the aver-age for law schools in general is having problems with women and with new (and not so new) ideas about women's equality and law school teaching generally. After all, the profession is close to 25 percent female, so how likely is it that Harvard's faculty rate of 15 percent is just an accident? It is safe to say that the presence or absence of women on the faculty is more a sign of the underlying culture than a cause.
But if the underlying culture is hostile to women's success, the students will suffer from it, just as deserving faculty candidates do. Again, Harvard is a good example of how all these things come together. For four years Harvard has occupied the unenviable position of dead last in the Princeton Review survey of student satisfaction, not just female student satisfaction. A few years ago, a couple of the law review editors at Harvard, Craig Coben and Kenneth Fenyo, took the occasion of the annual law review banquet to distribute a savage and unprecedently personal satire of a feminist scholar from another school whose work had been published over their protest by their law review that year. The extraordinary thing about Coben and Fenyo's "prank" is that it took place one year to the day after the woman had been brutally murdered.
Harvard has a remarkable paucity of females in the prestigious tenured and tenure-track faculty, and at 40 percent, their classes of '96 and '97 were less female than any of their competitors' except the University of Virginia, and one of the lowest in the country. The 40 percent of Harvard students who were women produced only 31 percent of the law review members in the classes of 1996 and 1997, generating a success rate for Harvard women of 78 percent, where 100 percent would be equal success with the Harvard men. The 1995 National Jurist placed Harvard at 167 out of the 168 schools it surveyed for female success.
Although each of these pieces of data could be explained as unrelated to women's success, after a while, the circumstantial evidence just adds up. To put it scientifically, if it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck, and it looks like a duck, chances are pretty good that it is a duck.
PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN IN THE STUDENT BODY
The second factor in the ranking is how integrated is the student body. Women make decisions about law schools for lots of reasons, good and bad. They go where they want to live (bad), where their "intuition" tells them (geez), where their boyfriends or lovers are (worse), where good public interest programs are, and where the highest status is.
For this study of all the law schools, I have included in the factors for ranking the law schools the percentage of females in fulltime programs in the classes of 1996 and 1997. In the classes of '96 and '97, women succeeded at making law review in excess of their full-time presence in the class at sixty-six schools; at just about 50 percent of those schools, there were more women students at or above the 44 percent national average.
Perhaps more important than the female student presence at success schools is the "bad news" statistic. Only 33 percent, or about one third, of the approximately ninety schools where women don't make law review in proportion to their numbers have student bodies at or above the average number of women students. Having a lot of women in the class isn't strictly correlated with success, but having fewer than usual does appear with suspicious frequency where women fail.
Like the number of women faculty, the relationship between women in the student body and success is small enough so that it could be explained away by other factors. If it matters, the percentage of women in the class should matter in the same way that the percentage of women in the powerful academic faculty matters. More women faculty, more women students. An integrated student body both reflects the culture and affects the culture. When we looked at thumbnail sketches of the schools where women succeed-and where they fail-that such schools often have cultures of success and failure and that such cultures really make a difference in how women do and that the factors in our rankings are symptoms of such differences.
WOMEN ON LAW REVIEW
All law schools ranked have some version of the general-interest law review, the student-run and edited journal that carries articles about various legal topics.
Column B of the rankings reports the percentage of full-time women in the classes of 1996 and 1997, the latest date for which data was available. Column C shows the rate at which women achieved law review, when they were second- and third-year students and thus eligible for law review. If women were on law review in exact proportion to their full-time percentage of the two eligible classes, the number in Column C would be 100. Any number under 100 reflects that women are underperforming; thus the men in the class have a better chance of making law review and the women a worse chance. Any number above 100 indicates women are succeeding beyond their numerical presence in the class, and the prospects of success are better for them and better for women than for men.
Different schools have different criteria for admission to law review, but they all start at the end of the first year. Most schools take a student's first-year grades and either admit the ones with the highest grades to the staff of the law review or allow students to compete for positions through a writing contest or, most commonly, some combination of grades and writing competition. Whether women make law review can, and usually does, represent two things. First, since grades almost always play a role, a lot of women on law review can represent a school where women get good grades. Since many of the law schools refused to provide us with exact breakdowns of male grades vs. female grades at the end of the first year, I am using law review in part as a stand-in for the missing data. Second, the percentage of women on law review can be affected by the method of selection, which, in turn, gives us a hint about how much importance the institution puts on first- year grades. If the institution is insistent on only valuing the first- year exams, which resemble the LSAT in that national statistics reveal that women do a little less well on them, it is a clue that the institution may not be as friendly to women as you would wish.
But it's only a clue. Since the deans of most law schools were unwilling to respond to our survey for this women's guide, I have used the percentage of women on law review as a rough measure of women's first-year grades. This should guide you to where you should apply. But once you're accepted, if you're considering enrolling in one of these schools whose the law review numbers indicate a problem in women's success, I suggest you ask the admissions people directly how their female students come out grade-wise at the end of the first year. And ask the hard questions: How did the top 10 percent break down? How did the eligible class for law review break down? Maybe when they're facing someone with a $15,000 check in her hand, the admissions offices will be a little more responsive.
The only wild card in this is that, although I counted all the female names on the law reviews, I did not include in my female student count the women in part-time programs, usually night school. Over 50 of the 174 accredited law schools have more than a quarter of their students in night programs, and, for the most part, men and women in night school are eligible for law review, just like the full-time students. Since the law reviews don't distinguish between students from day and night programs, I counted all females on law review as if they came from the full-time program.
I ran a couple of calculations including the night students and didn't turn up much change in the ratings I got without them. There are two reasons for this. One, night students are almost always around a quarter or a third of the student body, so a difference in the gender composition of the night class would have to be very great to affect the totals, and I found that the night classes usually aren't much more than 5 or so percent more or less female than the day classes. Second, if there are more night females, the success score (Column C) goes down, but the female student body number (Column B) goes up, so the ultimate Femscore (Column D) is unlikely to change much. Conversely, if there are fewer night females, the success score goes up a little, but the student body score goes down.
Although a perfect survey would have to include night: students, it's harder to figure exactly which night students are eligible for law review, because night programs mostly take four years rather than three, and different schools have different cutoffs for law review eligibility. I have included a section, "The Night Schools," on page 164, for your information, with the percentage of females who got JDs in 1996 and in the two "classes" that preceded them. If you're considering a school with a night program and you want to be sure you've got their success score exactly calculated, you can ask the admissions office which part-timers are eligible for law review, and raise the score if the night female percentage is lower than in the main chart or lower it if the night female percentage is higher than in the main chart. I doubt you'll find it makes much difference.
ORDER OF THE COIF
The Order of the Coif is a legal honorary society. Not every law school can belong to the Order of the Coif. The original member schools, like the University of Wisconsin (1908) and the University of Illinois (1902), date back to the era of self-consciousness in legal education, when law schools were beginning to regard themselves as legitimate institutions of higher learning and not just trade schools. It was in this period that the American Association of Law Schools was founded and also the American Law Institute, a prestigious body of tony lawyers, judges, and law teachers who produce restatements of law and model codes for the rest of the country to adopt.
Of the approximately 174 total accredited American law schools, only 77, or fewer than half, had Coif chapters in 1995. If you look at the rankings, you will see that the farther down the LSAT scale of selectiveness you go, the scarcer the Coif chapters become. Perversely, there are no Coif chapters at the most elite end either. Harvard and Columbia apparently always knew they were too elite to belong to an association that took other law schools, and, after an initial flirtation with democracy in 1919,Yale let its chapter go inactive.
Since Coif is not universal, I could not use it to rank all the law schools. However, membership in the Order of the Coif is an important source of information about women in law school, because only students in roughly the top 10 percent of the class get to join. So by analyzing the list of Coif members for gender clues, we can get a hint of where women succeed all the way to the top 10 percent of their class, a much more selective measure than membership on law review. Also, since Coif is pure grades, it tells us something different from law review, which is often selected on the basis of grades and various writing competitions.
The bad news is that the latest published numbers end with the class of'95, and one dean told me that the published lists are limited to the people who pay a one-time trivial admissions fee after they are elected. So some cheapskate Coif members may not be included. Since, unlike the classes of '96 and '97, which are recorded in the ABA Official Guide to Approved Law Schools, I do not know the exact percentage of women at any school for the class of '95, it's hard to gauge where women outperformed their percentage of the class and where they did not. So first I've given you the actual percentage of Coif members who were female in '95. If you wish, you can look at the percentage of females in the classes of '96 and '97 and compare the percentage of women who made it into Coif in the previous class.
But be careful. If a school like Georgetown has classes of '96 and '97 that are 47 percent female on average, you can probably conclude that the class of '95 was around the same percentage female. Since Georgetown's women made up 53 percent of the Coif members in the class of '95, you would normally conclude that the women at Georgetown are making it into the top 10 percent at graduation at a pretty good rate. Interestingly Heather Marshs research at Georgetown revealed that the success rate of '95 did not hold up in the later classes, and our data on the '96 and '97 law review rate support this pessimistic conclusion. So 1995 may have been an anomaly. The only way to know for sure is to demand information for the classes since 1995 when you apply or after you're accepted.
Another way to use the data I've gathered for you on Coif membership is to assume that the class of '95 was on the whole 42 percent female. The percentage of women in law school has been turtling up by 1 or 2 percent in the nineties, so it's probably fair to assume that most schools with classes of 44 percent or 45 percent female in '96 and '97 had graduating classes of'95 around 42 percent female. So I calculated a hypothetical "Coif success rate" like the 1996-97 law review success rate, assuming that the class of'95 was 42 percent female, and put it next to the actual percentage of women who made Coif, just to give you another idea of what the Coif number may mean. I have put that school's success rate next to its ranking in the Femscore ratings, but I did not use the Coif numbers to establish the rating, because that would discriminate between schools that have Coif chapters and those that don't, and because I didn't have the exact data about how many women were in each school in the class of '95.
The Starring Low Schools
An * next to the school's name means the dean made some effort to answer my questionnaires to find out how women were doing. I sent hundreds of such questionnaires, including at least one questionnaire to each dean, and letters reminding the deans I had sent the surveys and more copies when the deans informed me the surveys had "gone astray." I sent surveys to each of the chairmen of the appointments committees, which pick the new faculty, to find out whether the school was making a good-faith effort to hire more women teachers. I sent a survey of student opinion to each of the women law student associations asking them to have an officer fill out the form. You will notice that few law schools bothered to respond.
I think the willingness to answer says something about the school. Yale, for instance, responded to the dean's questionnaire in a letter from the associate dean asking me to imagine how Yale "is inundated with requests for information and [has] to draw a line, generally at the point of information that we prepare for the variety of public records." I don't know what counts as a "public record" at Yale, but you should know that someone from Yale does give info to U. S. News & World Report every year. In response to a follow-up letter, the associate dean revealed that the "Law School [sic] provides extensive information to the American Bar Association ... by providing commonly requested information to this publication we, and other law schools, are able to disseminate it widely without having to complete numerous individual questionnaires." Several schools responded similarly, recommending that I read the ABA guide, which tells nothing about gender except the percentage of women students in each class. Apparently many people in the deans' offices around the country think that asking for information about 44 percent of the law school student body is just an "individual" request, rather than a "public request" like that of U. S. News & World Report. Although the media is full of stories about women students wanting their schools to look at the issue, many deans apparently think requests for information about gender are not "common." And of course if data aren't kept by gender, there's no pressure to change.
If the law school deans had bothered to answer the questionnaires, we would have known whether women's grades are higher or lower than men's grades are after each year of law school for the three most recent classes. We would have known whether women enter with the same qualifications, and so should be expected to do about the same. We would have known whether women make it into the top 10 percent at the same or different rates, as Lani Guinier found out at Penn. We would have learned whether a woman student could expect to see at least one female professor in the all-important first year and whether the casebook in a representative course reflects conservative, moderate, or liberal political views. We would have learned whether the school was one of a group where rape is included in the subject matter of the course in criminal law.
But don't think this is the end. You can press for answers yourself. Take a look at the questions I asked, and, when you visit or apply to law school, ask again. Ask the admissions dean how the women in last year's entering class succeeded. What percentage of them made law review, compared to their presence in the class? If the class is 40 percent female, is the top 10 percent also 40 percent female? Is the top half?
Many of the women I spoke to visited their prospective law schools, and several reported that their decision turned heavily on their "intuition" after "seeing the place," especially how pleasant the other students seemed. This is nuts. If you know a student or a student takes you around, ask your guide the questions on the student survey. Why should you pay thousands of dollars before you know if they've had any problem with professors hitting on the students or students harassing their female classmates into silence? Do all the first-year students have at least one woman professor in the big, required courses? Do the professors take the women's questions the same as they do the male students'? Do they turn to their female students in the crowd scene around the podium after class? Is rape treated as a serious crime in the class in criminal law, or is it not as important as the "real" crimes like theft and blackmail? This is law school-not a fraternity mixer. If the law schools blow off these questions, think again about going there.
Because there was no information for you consumers till now, there was no reason for the law schools to compete, and so they never have. An example of this came in an interview with Barbara Black, former dean at Columbia School of Law. Black, who is rightly considered a real heroine to women in law school, was dean when Columbia brought the liveliest and most diverse group of feminist legal scholars in the country to its campus, recruiting Martha Fineman from Wisconsin, who brought a whole symposium on women and the law with her when she came, as well as renowned critical race scholars Patricia Williams and Kimberle Crenshaw.
When asked whether the presence of this rare and prestigious group of feminist scholars added to Columbia's student appeal, she purported not to know or care. But when I unintentionally intimated that Columbia had a strong corporate law culture, she bristled visibly and complained that "Harvard and Yale didn't have the reputation as feeder schools for the New York law firms even though they were to the same extent that Columbia was," leaving me to conclude that she thinks that the impact of the school's reputation as a corporate feeder school is more important than its competitive reputation as a place for women.
Without direct answers, I was forced to figure out things like how many academic female faculty they did employ by interpreting their catalogs and how many women made law review by making a rough gender breakdown of the masthead and then putting the number against the number of full-time women students in the classes that were eligible. After I had calculated the numbers from the public record, I sent each dean a fourth letter, reporting the numbers and asking the school to correct them if they were wrong. For those twenty-some schools that responded,
I went over their numbers until every difference between their numbers and mine was accounted for. The numbers aren't going to be perfect, but it ill suits the law schools to complain. They had four chances to give me information themselves. Wouldn't you rather know something than nothing?
You Could Look It Up
Everybody in the business knows something about each other's law school. Four years ago, pretty much everyone knew about the Coben/Fenyo incident at Harvard. Two years ago, everyone knew that Northwestern had lost four of its six female academic faculty; one, who had spent just a year there, took one horrified look around and fled back to Cornell. We know where women mostly get hired only when the male faculty really want to hire-or keep-the guy she's sleeping with. We know where the harassers are. We know how the conservative/libertarian Federalist Society meetings function to introduce up-and-coming young conservative students, statistically mostly white and male, to established conservative judges and policy makers, and we know where the Federalist Society is very powerful. We know where public interest work is taken seriously and where it just gets lip service.
Problem is, not even your faithful guide knows everything, and it's not really fair to have a survey that doesn't try to report on every place equally. Anyway, the numbers for female faculty, students, success in making law review, and percentage of female Coif members should reveal a pretty consistent picture of the institution without every stray bit of gossip.
But you, as Casey Stengel would say, "could look it up." I turned my computer on, went into the Nexis database, and in an hour turned up stories of some seriousness. Using the search terms "women" and "gender" and "sex" and "law school," I found stories in papers and magazines from around the country that should cause prospective students to ask hard questions about any of the schools discussed. At one very high status school, a study revealed that the women were getting far fewer of the important judicial clerkships than the men were. This was mysterious, because the women apparently had grades that were the same as those of the men who applied. As we have seen, those clerkships play a big role in making a career at the top of the legal profession. Two other schools had been sued by women faculty for wrongful denial of tenure, and both had paid, one big bucks, to keep the cases from trial. Another had just denied three women tenure and was defending itself on charges that no women at all held the prestigious named chairs there. Six schools were being sued on grounds that their male teachers had sexually harassed the students. And one was having a hiring war because some of the faculty didn't want to take on the wife of a male professor the school was trying to keep.
You can do what I did. After you identify the schools that interest you, go to the library and use the computer with the Lexis/Nexis database on it or look up the local papers on the Internet. Then search for stories about your schools. If you use Nexis, you can use my search terms. If you turn up a story, chances are the climate hasn't improved a lot. Better ask some hard questions.
Women Do Better at Public Institutions
Ten out of the fifteen top schools for women by Femscore are public, state schools (University of Washington, University of California at Davis, ASU, Oregon, Kentucky, Maryland, Wayne State, West Virginia, University of North Dakota, and Southern). Only three of the fifteen worst schools are public institutions (George Mason, South Carolina, and Montana).
Women Do Better at Integrated Institutions
Eleven of the fifteen best schools are educating minorities as well as women, with minority populations of 15 percent or more (Duke, University of Washington, University of California at Davis, ASU, Maryland, Seattle, Wayne State, Chicago-Kent, California Western, John Marshall, and Southern). Only four of the worst fifteen schools are educating minorities as well as women, with minority student populations of 15 percent or more (Chicago, Northwestern,Tulane, and McGeorge).
Women Do Better at Northern and Western Schools Thirteen of the fifteen best schools for women are located in the North or West (University of Washington, University of California at Davis, Arizona State University, Oregon, Kentucky, Maryland, Seattle, Wayne State, West Virginia, Chicago-Kent, California Western, University of North Dakota, John Marshall). Only two of the best schools-Duke and Southern in Louisiana-are located in the South, that is, states that were part of the Old Confederacy during the Civil War (Maryland and Kentucky were border states, slave, but Union, and West Virginia broke away from Virginia), and one of the two southern schools, Southern, is more than half African American. The picture is more ambiguous at the bottom. Eight of the worst fifteen schools are in the North or West (Chicago, Northwestern, George Washington, Brigham Young, Montana, McGeorge, Detroit Mercy, and Ohio North-ern). Seven of the worst schools are all in the states of the Old Confederacy (Tulane, George Mason, South Carolina, Campbell, Mercer, Stetson, and Cumberland).
Students Sort of Know If Their School Is Women-Friendly
Many law school guides, such as the Princeton Review's The Best Law Schools, are based on surveys of students at the schools. Princeton boasts a survey of "eleven thousand current law students at the 170 law schools profiled." The Princeton survey allowed the students to address what was best and worst about their schools and clearly left room for students to opine about the gender environment and general political environment.
At eight of the fifteen schools where women did worst, the students articulated awareness of gender problems to the Princeton survey. At five schools, students complained. Students at Brigham Young complained that the students were not diverse, Tulane registered a need for more diverse faculty, and Northwestern students complained the faculty was not only "not diverse," but also homogeneous and ideological; when asked about hits and misses, McGeorge students registered "gender bias" in their "miss" column. Some of Campbell's women "complained that condescension directed specifically at minority and female students sometimes hampers their efforts to succeed." Perhaps most interestingly, at three schools where women don't succeed, students expressed some enthusiasm for an environment where women don't succeed. Chicago's students were "all over the map" on Chicago's treatment of women and thought Chicago's reputation was "undeserved." Some students at the University of South Carolina willingly embraced the conservatism of the student body, one first-year student saying, "This is one of the most conservative law schools in America. I like that." According to the Princeton Review, many students at George Mason listed the lack of diversity "as a positive characteristic [emphasis added]."
At the seven other failure schools, students at six schools-George Washington, Mercer, Cumberland, Ohio Northern, Detroit Mercy, and Stetson-had no complaints, and at the seventh-Montana-registered pleasure in the reality of their diverse faculties.
On the other side of things, students at the success schools say almost uniformly positive things to Princeton about the diversity and supportiveness of their institutions. None of the surveys at the success schools reported gender bias. At six of the fifteen success schools, Duke, University of Washington, Oregon, Seattle, ASU, and Southern, the students uniformly praised their diverse classmates. As an Oregon student described it: "You can find a conservative male student sitting comfortably next to a woman with a nose ring in almost every class."
At Washington, Oregon, and Maryland, the students reported progressive administrations and faculty, which in turn generated requests for a little conservatism into the mix! Three surveys at success schools-Chicago-Kent, California Western, and John Marshall-turned up no opinion on issues of gender or diversity.
At Duke, the women-friendliest school in the top group, Princeton reports, "We heard almost nothing but positive remarks."
One Last Thing
If you looked at the curriculum in the catalogs for most American law schools, you'd think Gloria Steinem or Catharine MacKinnon was running the world. The inclusion of gender-oriented courses matters. Since women are more than half the population, issues about women come up in all kinds of legal contexts. The issues aren't just the obvious ones like rape and discrimination, either. In civil procedure, a very hot current issue is the extent to which civil discovery can be used to uncover the prior sexual history of a harassment complainant. Remember President Clinton's acquaintance Paula Jones's high school boyfriends? In torts, issues of product liability increasingly include hormonal treatment of all sorts. Property was an historic way to enforce the law of marriage. In contracts, we should be asking why the courts don't enforce contracts for sexual services. If a school offers lots of courses about women in the legal system, chances are those issues will be adequately covered in the general courses as well.
How much curriculum can a school like Harvard, with 15 percent female faculty, manage? Not much, unless Harvard is a hotbed of feminist men. In which case, we'd expect Harvard to find worthy females to hire as colleagues. Maybe you're not interested in how the law works in women's lives. But if such courses and subjects aren't offered, you'll never get the chance to make that choice.
