BRIAN TAMANAHA: How Law School Policies Entrench The Elite.

The key dynamic involves the students who are made to pay full fare. Typically, they will be in the bottom half of the LSAT/GPA profile of students admitted to the JD class at any particular school. The highest ranked schools have students with the highest LSAT/GPA combination—with LSAT numbers steadily falling as you travel down the ranking. For example, an applicant with a 171 LSAT would have placed in the bottom 25 percent of the class at Yale, but in the top 25 percent at Michigan, Penn, Berkeley, Virginia, Duke, and so on.

An applicant in this position would be confronted with a tough choice: go to Yale and pay full price ($50,750 this year), or attend a lower down school, say Duke ($44,722), with a tuition discount of half or more; Yale at $150,000 tuition over three years or Duke at $70,000. When you add in projected expenses, the final price would be $207,000 for a degree at Yale versus $118,000 for a degree at Duke. (The numbers work out similarly for a choice between Harvard and Duke.)

Applicants from wealthy families who can help financially wouldn’t hesitate to go to Yale. But applicants from middle class families—school teachers, middle management, small business owners, solo practitioner lawyers (parents who exhausted their resources helping their child make it through college without debt)—will find the Duke offer hard to turn down. Evidence of this wealth effect can perhaps be seen in the fact that, although its tuition is among the highest in the country (and the school rarely awards full scholarships), only 73 percent of Yale 2011 graduates had law school debt—among the lowest in the country. (At most schools 80 to 95 of graduates have law school debt.)

This might not seem like a major concern because a student who goes to Duke will have an outstanding career anyway. That is correct as far as it goes, but there is more. Law is a highly elitist, credential-oriented profession. Harvard and Yale degrees open more doors, more easily than do Duke degrees. Consider that in the history of the United States Supreme Court, seventeen Justices attended Harvard, ten attended Yale, and seven attended Columbia; no other law school counts more than three; Duke has none.

I turned down free rides from Duke and Chicago to go to Yale with only modest scholarship money. That was the right decision then — and I remember joining with another student who had the same experience in persuading (successfully) a prospective student to turn down those free rides and come to Yale. I’m not so sure it would be the right decision today, even allowing for the above. But maybe.

And, as Brian notes, the impact grows much greater when the choice is between schools farther down the ladder. “In this manner, the tuition-scholarship relationship to the higher-versus-lower-school choice constitutes an allocation matrix that uniformly funnels wealthy applicants to the higher school, securing the attendant advantages, while people with less financial means divide between higher and lower. Multiply this out by tens of thousands of like decisions each year and the effect is large. The pricing structure of law schools thereby helps the wealthy in America further consolidate their grip on elite legal positions.”