The law school admission process is involved. Your undergraduate GPA, LSAT score, letters of recommendation and more come into play as part of your application package. One implicit law school requirement is that you be smart and, indeed, law students tend to be among the brightest of the bunch. Of all professions, few outside of academia require so much academic preparation and attract such able minds.
So, it’s reasonable to ask when you are considering legal study whether or not you can make the grade. In fact, many readers of my blog have asked at exact question: Am I smart enough for law school? So let’s spend some time considering the question and asking whether or not it is the right question in the first place.
Do law schools care if you are smart? Not really. Admissions officers do care about your undergraduate GPA and your LSAT scores, which themselves could be considered as indicators of brainpower. But what the schools actually care about is how your numbers function as predictors of success in their institution. For example, the admissions office at Stanford Law School knows that applicants who score in the 97th percentile or higher on the LSAT will have the greatest odds of succeeding in their classes at Stanford and getting good jobs when they graduate. Schools also care about these numbers from a competitive perspective — Stanford knows that they don’t have to accept anyone but the “best”, to the degree that is measurable by your application materials.
But I think it is a mistake to assume that this numbers game — which really focuses on predictors of success and competitiveness — tells the whole story about how smart you have to be for law. The question isn’t necessarily how smart, but what kind of smart you need to be for the study of law.
Law school actually rewards certain kinds of smarts and not others. What kind of smart matters in your legal education? In general, analytic smarts are far more important than intellectual smarts. A mind that is skilled in analysis is good at slicing and dicing problems — breaking problems down into pieces that can have rules or arguments applied to them (see my article on law school preparation for the reasoning skills commonly applied in law school).
Intellectual smarts, by contrast, are used for applying philosophical frameworks or historical perspectives to circumstances. Intellectuals might be interested in looking at problems from a higher level or synthesizing meaning out of the written word or cultural phenomena. It may be an over-generalization, but it’s fair to say that there is almost no room for this kind of smarts in legal study. Instead, law school involves taking certain formulas for argumentation and learning how to apply them in a variety of circumstances. Analytic smarts will get you far in your law classes, while intellectual smarts are viewed as “soft” skills.
