HLS in Focus

Students often ask what we’re looking for in an applicant, beyond a history of strong academic performance.  While there are many other factors, one that often gets overlooked or minimized in the minds of applicants is a demonstrated history of leadership and impact.  Intellectual ability is obviously a key factor in admissions here, but we’re very fortunate to receive applications from more talented students than we can possibly fit in an entering class.  One thing that really sets applicants apart is what they’ve done with their time outside the classroom or how they’ve built upon their academic work.

Now this isn’t something that you can start to think about around the time you’re starting to fill out your law school applications.  It’s more about how you’ve spent the last few years.  Have you dedicated yourself to an extracurricular or cause?  Have you taken on a leadership role in a group or job that has allowed you to create significant change or have a meaningful impact?  There’s no one right answer here – the key is to use your application to let us know about situations where you’ve come in and changed things for the better. 

A big part of being at HLS is immersing yourself in a community of people who are dedicated to change and impact across a variety of fields.  A great way to convince us that you’ll be a positive addition to this community is to explain how you’re already doing this – I can’t wait to read about it. 

- Josh

I have noticed from talking to my law school minded friends and from reading this blog that the next law school admissions cycle is in full swing. With this comes the one-two punch of meticulous application preparation followed by the seemingly endless wait to hear back from the various schools people have applied to.

I know that it can be easy to feel that you are somehow behind in the process, or that your results aren’t matching up with those of others. I figured that being a newly minted 1L, I am not that far removed from the process, and it might be helpful to talk about my experiences with the dreaded law school admissions cycle.

My trip to Harvard Law was pretty non-traditional. By May, I was still on the wait-list at HLS and had subsequently made arrangements to go to a different law school. I was quick to set up my housing and financial aid with that school because I knew that I was going to be be out of the country all summer doing volunteer work in South Africa. I left for my summer abroad in early June, assuming that there was little to no chance I was going to make it off the waitlist so late in the admissions game.

I arrived back in the US in late July and almost immediately received an email asking if I was still interested in a spot in the entering class at HLS. To put this in context, I had been in the country for less than a day and I was planning on leaving my home in less than a week to go to a different law school. Even if I were able to prepare for the phone interview, I would still need to divert all of my energies to going to a new law school, essentially accomplishing in a couple days the preparations that every other 1L had all summer to arrange. However, HLS was my dream school, and if I didn’t at least try to get in I would always wonder if I could have. I replied to the email and arranged to take my phone interview the following Monday.

I’m going to let you guys in on a secret about the HLS phone interviews. After your interview, you will feel that your performance was anywhere from “meh” to “terrible”. Personally, mine probably leaned towards terrible. I had planned on spending most of the time talking about my experiences that summer in South Africa. My rationale was that my application talked in detail about the things I had done while an undergraduate and my summer was something new that would add color to my application. However, when I got on the phone I think interview jitters seized me and I only spent about a minute talking about my summer before delving into the activities I had done in college. Every one of my answers seemed like an unhelpful rehash of things from my application. At the end, I was pretty certain that in an attempt to sound interested in the school (which I was) I asked too many questions and I came off as poorly researched about the school (which I wasn’t). When my mother called me that afternoon to ask how the interview went, I assured her that she didn’t need to worry about adding crimson to her wardrobe any time soon.

Assuming that whoever is reading this is aware of what website they are on, you probably also know how this story ends. The next morning I got a phone call offering me a spot in the entering class at HLS. In my excitement, I pumped my fists in the air so hard that I broke a ceiling tile in my basement.

I thought my story might be helpful for any potential applicants out there to hear. I know that it’s hard sometimes, but it is important not to stress about the process too much. I remember agonizing over what I was going to say in my phone interview, only to do something completely different in the actual interview. If you are relaxed and talk about yourself and your accomplishments honestly and openly, you will be fine. It is also important not to get freaked out if your application results aren’t matching up with the results you are hearing about from other people. I had heard all the message board chatter about how not getting off the waitlist by Date X was the death knell for my application. I also had a lot of friends and friends of friends that were getting into their dream schools (including HLS) while my application results were just trickling in. It’s easy to get discouraged with all of the activity going on around these applications. It is important to stay positive about your chances, because in the end you will almost certainly end up in a school that is a good fit for you.

- Anit

Ah, the annual Halloween party at Harvard.  Halloween was already my favorite holiday because I love the creativity of costumes and I have an unbelievable sweet tooth.  I also love the HLS/costume connection in Legally Blonde where Elle Woods dresses up like a Playboy bunny to go to a costume party that turns out to be a non-costume party.  Classic.  Then I got to real HLS and discovered case law-inspired Halloween costumes, which crack me up even more than that scene because they are so dorkily awesome.  F or example. . .

Our 1L year, a group of my friends dressed up like the characters from the famous tort case Ploof v. Putnam, a case that asks whether you are allowed to tether your boat to a stranger’s dock in the middle of a storm even though it will damage the dock.  Most people’s intuition about this is yes, even without permission you should be able to dock your boat in an emergency.  Then you learn that the people on the boat are pirates.  This makes for a much more interesting legal discussion, and a much more fun Halloween costume—what calls for festivities more than an eye patch, a swashbuckler’s hat, and a question of legal trespass for private necessity?

I’ve also seen three guys dressed up like the fox and the two hunters from Pierson v. Post, which is the first property case almost every law student in the country learns. The legal question there is who owns the fox if you chase it around forever on a hunt and then another guy comes out of nowhere and shoots it, but for the purposes of Halloween parties it just means that whenever partygoers realize why the guy is dressed up like a fox, they chase him around for a minute. 

Last year at the HLS Halloween party I saw a guy who went as an eggshell plaintiff.  A funny costume, but as you might imagine, everyone kept kicking him in the shins.  Well, maybe you wouldn’t imagine that unless you know that the concept of an eggshell plaintiff is exemplified by Vosburg v. Putney, where one kid kicked another kid in the shin and the guy ended up losing his leg because the kick aggravated a previous injury.  Again, funny costume, but you’re kind of asking for it if you dress up as a guy who’s supposed to get kicked in the shin.  In normal world, it’s the bullies who go around kicking people.  In law school world, it’s the people who understand what you are if you come to a costume party dressed as an eggshell.

So if you do come to HLS and you get invited to a costume party, don’t worry, you are not getting Legally Blonded, there really is a big Halloween party every year and people really do dress up in costumes for it.  I say embrace your inner geek and look to your 1L casebooks for inspiration.  But if you’re thinking about going as Jonathan Vosburg, consider shin guards.          

- Erin

One of the greatest perks of being at Harvard is getting to know the people. I am always amazed when I talk to my classmates about their interests and hobbies. As a 2L it has been especially interesting to talk to other students about what they did with their 1L summer. I recently sat down with a friend and asked him to tell me all about his summer in New York City. During last year’s spring on-campus interview season, he met with recruiters from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. A week after his short interview he got a phone call with an offer. He immediately accepted. As a native of New York, he was excited to be home for the summer and because the internship was unpaid, he was eligible for a Summer Public Interest Fund stipend.

The summer turned out to be a great success. His placement in the civil division involved a lot of legal research and writing. Throughout the course of the summer, he was able to research several different topics including inmates’ rights to counsel and federal tort claims under the Medical Care Recovery Act. His first big lesson of the summer was that, “1L Civil Procedure does matter.” He realized this when his very first research assignment was all about international service of process and personal jurisdiction under New York’s long arm statute. I know all of this is gibberish unless you have taken civil procedure but after a semester in law school, you will understand how frightening those words can be and how great it is to see that you didn’t spend a week studying them for nothing. In addition to writing informal internal memos, he had the opportunity to write first drafts of motions for his supervising attorneys including a motion for summary judgment on employment discrimination under Title Seven.

The summer wasn’t restricted to just research and writing, the internship also came with trips to the courthouse to observe trials in the district court and oral arguments in the 2nd circuit. The office also offered a trial advocacy workshop for its small group of fifteen summer interns. The interns were able to participate in a mock trial at the end of the program and prepare segments of the oral arguments. Last summer there was even the opportunity to have a picture taken with U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder.

In the end, the internship was exactly what he expected. One of the greatest benefits of working in government is that they are often short on resources and really need help from interns. This means that you get real work that the attorneys often incorporate into their final briefs and presentations. There are so many different legal opportunities to take advantage of your 1L summer and I never get tired of hearing about them.

- Elizabeth

I met my “big sis,” a 2L from the Boston area, for lunch during the first week of school and a few more times each semester when events like exams, class registration, and summer job applications were approaching. From the very beginning, she was a wonderful source of frank advice about professors, classmates, and the ultimate 1L concern of how much a person should study.

She was also very geared toward public interest and happened to work with several activities that interested me, so it was terrific to have her perspective as I decided what to join. Her involvement on two journals allowed for comparisons that helped me choose mine, and her advice about different student practice groups was part of what led me to the Tenant Advocacy Project, a really defining part of my HLS experience. As time went on with that, she shared experiences from her work with the Legal Aid Bureau, helping me feel more confident and prepared as a student advocate.

It was great having so much in common with my “big sis,” but I think anyone who had made it through 1L year would have been a great resource as I found my niche here at Harvard. In a big school where connections beyond your assigned section can take effort, it was great to be paired with someone already eager to help out. That’s why I decided to pay the favor forward and take on a “little sis” of my own this year. It’s been easy to keep in touch so far through e- mails, a frozen yogurt date, a WLA wine and cupcakes party, and some chance encounters on campus. And it feels good to answer her questions about outlines, exams, and jobs, just trying to be the same helpful resource I had last year.

Meanwhile, WLA is not the only group with big siblings. I know the progressive American Constitution Society has mentors, for instance, and two friends of mine are big and little siblings with APALSA, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association. So there are many opportunities for the same positive experience as mine.

- Lea

Got a great question at an info session the other day: why does it take us as long as it does to review your application? 

First off, we don’t have any shortcuts or thresholds.  We’ve found that there’s no substitute for a complete reading of your application including your transcript, recommendations, personal statement, resume, and application questions.  We only evaluate candidates once we’ve reviewed their entire file – this takes longer but we think it helps us build a better class. 

Further, no one individual’s opinion holds sway – both our admissions officers and our faculty admissions committee are highly involved in reading applications.  Each application has multiple readers – again, this takes a bit longer, but we think its worth it. 

So while we want to get you a decision as quickly as possible, we also want to make sure we’re giving your application the consideration it deserves.   Hang in there and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. 

Have a great weekend!

Josh

One of the main reasons that I chose to come to Harvard for law school was how easy it is to get around. As an undergraduate I often felt like I was trapped within the same ten-block radius. There wasn’t really good public transportation and the best I could do with the bus was go to the mall a few towns over. I decided that I couldn’t live that way for another three years. I wanted to be able to go to the grocery store without having to call a taxi, go shopping without a hassle and feel like I wasn’t tied down. I knew that Harvard was the answer to my problems when I visited for the first time.

I rode the Amtrak up from Connecticut for my admitted student tour. Getting to campus from South Station with the “T” (Cambridge’s subway) couldn’t have been easier. After my tour and lunch with an admissions fellow, I found myself starved for something to do because my train didn’t leave for hours. Sadly, my first instinct was to take the T back to south station and wait. Instead, I decided to ask the people in admissions for some suggestions. The woman in the office pulled out tons of materials on all the things I could do with my free evening. She gave me simple directions and I left happy and determined to make the most of the couple hours I had left. I ended up taking the red line to the Park Street station. When I exited the station I got really excited. To my right was a huge park called the Boston Common and to my left was a very large movie theater. I walked up the street slowly and stopped occasionally to check out all the monuments that surround the park. I was so happy that such interesting things were easily accessible from the law school. I was also very impressed with the movie theater and I still don’t think I have ever seen a nicer one. They have classic movie posters and famous movie quotes all over the walls. They even offer funnel cake! Getting back home on the train was just as easy as the trip in. The ease with which I got around that day was a huge relief for me. I left very satisfied with my one-day Harvard experience.

As a current student, I am very happy with the choice that I made. I don’t have a car or a bike so if I need to get somewhere I’m probably going to walk. It is really nice not to have to worry about how I am going to carve out enough travel time to run errands when I am busy with schoolwork and activities. Fortunately, I don’t have to. There are two grocery stores within a ten-minute walk of my Harvard-Affiliated apartment. I can walk to Target in twenty minutes. And of course if I want to go out to eat instead of cooking, there are at least 5 restaurants within two minutes of my apartment. I can get to Harvard Square for many of the HLS social events in no time. If it is too late to walk home alone, I can hop into one of the many cabs that make Harvard Square their base.

I no longer feel like I’m confined to the area around my classes and home. It’s great to have so many affordable ways to get around quickly and easily. I’m glad I gave so much thought to how I would get around in my every day life when choosing a law school. I may even go to the Boston Common this weekend…

- Elizabeth

By all objective measures, this past Saturday should have been miserable. I spent the afternoon, trudging through random neighborhoods on four hours of sleep, in the middle of a downpour. Given all of these factors, it would probably be a little strange to know that I was actually really enjoying myself.

This past weekend was Fall Fest, a Harvard-wide day of service. Basically, the school organized a bunch of service projects and encouraged students to participate in them. I’m not going to pretend that my initial inkling towards getting involved was completely altruistic. The night of the deadline to sign-up, I got an excited email from a friend of mine saying that our section was four people away from being the section with the most people to participate. The prize for the most well-represented section was a free tab at the bar of their choosing. I figured that if I got to help the community, hang out with my friends, and get a shot at free drinks all at the same event, it probably made sense to give it a try.

I threw my name down on the last activity that still had spots available, Project No One Leaves. I woke up the next morning, bright and early, and headed over to campus to figure out what I would be doing that day. As it turns out, No One Leaves is a group that educates foreclosed homeowners and renters about their options and provides them with free legal advice. I was going to spend the day with a small group of law students, going door to door to homes that had recently been foreclosed on and talking with the residents about their rights. After a training session, we were broken up into small groups and assigned a member of No One Leaves to canvass with.

On the drive over to the neighborhood that we would be canvassing, I started to ask our group leader more about the rights of foreclosed people. She told me a number of things that I had not known about the foreclosure crisis. For one, the banks usually try to undergo “no fault” evictions. They will try to kick renters off the foreclosed property despite the fact that the renters have paid, and would like to continue to pay, their rent. If this doesn’t work they will offer people small, one-time cash sums to get people out of their homes. What is most incredible is that in most instances the tenant has the right to stay in their home, if the eviction is of no fault of their own. The whole situation was something I had read about in the paper and seen on the news, but not something I had been given a chance to interact with firsthand.

As we began canvassing I was surprised by a number of things. At first, I was shocked at how welcoming people were to us. I am not sure why, but I had just assumed that people would be highly suspicious of the random ivy league twenty-somethings that had showed up on their doorstep on a Saturday morning, with fliers in hand ready to lecture them about the law. In actuality, people were just excited to have some reasonable person speak with them about their situations.

The other thing that surprised me, was how I was able to apply what I had been learning in class to what I was seeing that day. In civil procedure, we had learned that before taking away someone’s property you must give them “service of process” or fair notice. But if this were true, why were so many of the people we were speaking with learning of their foreclosure for the first time? In contracts, we learned that in order for a contract to be formed there must be a “meeting of the minds”. But how could the tenants and the banks be on the same page when the tenants were so woefully misinformed about their rights?

I know that the rudimentary grasp of these complex issues I have as a first semester law student probably didn’t allow me to fully understand what I was seeing. However, it wouldn’t take a legal expert to realize that on some level the situations we were confronting were fundamentally unjust. When we were driving back home after our day spent canvassing, I was pretty glad that my friends had managed to convince me to come out. I had spent the day learning about a truly meaningful application of my coursework, placed in a setting that, up until that point, I had only really known from newspaper headlines and talking head segments. I’m not sure if this is a fair barometer of how successful the day was, but I had actually forgotten about the free bar tab that had driven me to help out in the first place, until I wrote about it for this post.

- Anit

I learned a new term last year: leaf peeping.  Like most people, I’ve been leaf peeping my whole life, I just didn’t realize that there was an official term for it—or, for that matter, that the official term would sound like a game to be played with babies.  It turns out that leaf peeping is the bona fide term for standing around looking at fall leaves.  Who knew?  I also didn’t realize how big of a big deal it is in New England.  I’ve lived in plenty of places with deciduous trees before, but none of my former stomping grounds include businesses in the region that hang banners that say things like “Welcome, peepers!” and “Get your peeping snacks here!”

To be fair, the hype is not baseless.  The leaves do seem to be brighter-prettier-longer here.  I don’t know why, and my extensive research on the subject (read: two minutes on Wikipedia and another two on Google) has not revealed any answers.  I once talked to a random guy at a retirement party for my former boss who claimed it has something to do with an enzyme found only in New England soil that causes all the leaves here to change at the same time.  Again, thirty seconds on Google didn’t provide any info one way or the other on this possibly fictitious enzyme, which clearly indicates that the answer cannot be known by humankind. 

I’ve had three autumns here now, and to celebrate peeping season we have gone apple picking, driving through western Mass, hiking in New Hampshire, and free food sample chasing in Vermont.  As I write this, I’m realizing that this whole leaf peeping thing might sound lame, but it’s really quite charming.  I guess you just have to see it to get why people like it so much.  Okay, I can’t resist—you just have to peep it.  Okay, I’m done.  I’m not going to say another thing.  Not another. . .peep. 

I can’t help it.  Peep.    

- Erin

This Friday I spent part of a very peaceful afternoon de-cluttering my e-mail inbox, which is always a funny process of reliving whole stretches of my life in just minutes. As I scrolled past birthdays and various technical edits for my journal, I realized it was around this time last year that the American Studies department where I majored in undergrad decided to feature me in their annual newsletter.

They asked for 600 words about my experiences since graduation, which I remember finding difficult because so much seemed to have changed for me in such a short time. But I managed to keep it brief, and it was interesting to re-read what I chose to say and remember how I felt just a few months into law school, so I thought I’d share. It went like this:

It’s amazing the places my American Studies education has taken me over the past year.

Just last March—which sometimes feels like yesterday, sometimes a lifetime ago—I found myself in New Orleans researching a senior thesis on that city’s public housing. Placing great trust in my professors’ advice and the power of scholarship money, I had chosen to focus my vague ideas about housing projects on a single city I’d never even visited—and suddenly, I was there. I spent my spring break not only elbow-deep in archives at Tulane University, but falling in love with New Orleans: its food, its architecture, its bittersweet mixture of community spirit and lingering racial and economic strife. By sheer benefit of majoring in American Studies, I was no stranger to these issues. It felt like having instant access to a secret history seldom revealed to outsiders like me.

It’s a long way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’m now a student at Harvard Law. But American Studies has had its influence, in one form or another, at every point along the way. Throughout a difficult law school application process, few people were more supportive than my thesis advisor, Steven Hoelscher. And that classic skill of seeing documents in their historical context, stressed so heavily in American Studies, has been useful since my first day here. Not to mention the AMS course that convinced me to study law in the first place: Sarah Weddington’s “Gender Discrimination,” which I would recommend to anyone interested in testing the waters of a legal education.

Of course, nothing could fully prepare me for the reality of Harvard Law School. Life here moves at a breakneck pace, so I was very lucky to arrive in Cambridge after a relaxing summer, a full month before school began. Unlike some of my classmates, I had time to plant my roots and explore the Boston area before things got too hectic. Its marriage of big-city bustle and college-town eccentricity reminds me of Austin in many ways, and I feel more like a local every day.

However, Harvard itself has quickly become the real center of my world. It’s just as challenging and stimulating as you’d predict, full of brilliant professors and demanding coursework. But our 18 classroom hours each week also compete with an impossible number of student groups, volunteer opportunities, and prestigious speakers seeming to arrive daily. Unable to resist, I’ve wound up joining a small reading group that meets in one of my professors’ homes, working on a law journal, and serving as an exit pollster on Election Day. Most rewarding of all, I’ve also joined a student practice organization called the Tenant Advocacy Project, which provides legal help to public housing tenants. TAP is the most enriching part of my Harvard experience so far, and I might never have joined were it not for UT American Studies and the thesis I wrote there.

Luckily, exhausting as all this can be, it still isn’t the Harvard Law of The Paper Chase, One L, or even Legally Blonde. At today’s Harvard the professors are kinder, the classmates more social, the administration more approachable, and the free coffee more bountiful than the reputation suggests. As our fabulous Dean put it during orientation, “The competition is over. And you won.”

If that’s true, it is largely due to my experience in American Studies at UT. There I discovered the issues I’m passionate about, and here I’m learning how to make a career out of them. It’s been a match made in heaven so far, and I can hardly wait to see where it takes me next.

It’s pretty cheesy in retrospect, and of course it credits my undergraduate program with an awful lot. But looking back, I think it also really captures my enthusiasm as the first semester of law school drew to a close. Now that I’ve gotten comfortable and take Harvard for granted a bit more, it’s good to be reminded of what makes this experience so special.

- Lea