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Advice for Women on Choosing a Law School
If you're applying to law school, whether you're a man or a woman (but especially if you're a woman), there are some simple things that you should do before you decide where to go to learn the law. The first is to read both "Becoming Gentlemen: Women's Experiences at One Ivy League Law School," (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, November 1994) by Lani Guinier and "The Legal Education of Twenty Women," (Stanford Law Review, May 1988), by Catherine Weiss and Louise Melling.
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These two essays should be required reading for anyone who wants to apply to law school. Why? Because a natural assumption would be that the "higher" the level of education, the lower the levels of unprofessional behavior, inappropriate comments, sexual harassment, and unfair practices. However, these two studies blow that assumption out of the water. In certain law schools, women are shocked at how badly they are being treated -- and it shows in how they are performing.

The second thing you can do is to check certain statistics on the law schools you are interested in, such as the percentage of women on law review and the percentage of female tenure and tenure-track professors.

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Your third step should be to go to each law school and talk with female students and female professors about how women are treated at that law school.

And finally, see if the school has published any gender studies about itself; if they have, obtain and read those studies.

If ignorance of the law is not a reasonable defense for a defendant, then ignorance of your prospective law school's policies and practices shouldn't be the one factor that ruins your chances at a decent education. When narrowing down your law school choices, you should do your own informal gender study of the schools in which you are interested as part of your general research. While this may seem like a lot of work, it will seem like nothing compared to the amount of work that you'll be expected to complete while in law school.

No Regrets
The point here is this: If you're going to commit three years of your life and anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 (which you'll probably be borrowing), you should have enough respect for your own well-being to find a law school that you'll be happy with -- or at least a law school that you won't regret having gone to.

There are clearly many law schools that will not make you regret your choice -- your mission is to find one of those places. Because until law schools free themselves from their medieval rigor mortis with regard to their perception and treatment of women (and their twentieth-century rigor mortis with regard to their reliance on standardized testing to evaluate applicants), one can't assume that every institution of higher learning will necessarily be a place where both genders can excel.


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