NOT SO MUCH: Do they Teach Law at Yale Anymore? When I was there they never offered a full blown UCC course, or Secured Transactions. I learned negotiable instruments and documents of title from Charlie Black in Admiralty.

Graduates from the elite law schools are mighty good activists, but lawyers? Not so much. The law students shouting down free speech at Stanford today are the leftist activists of tomorrow.

It may be that clients would be better off hiring lawyers from a Southeastern Conference law school like University of Tennessee, University of Alabama, or a more mainstream program like Pitt, Arizona, or Miami.

Contributing to the rot are the large law firms who think filling their ranks with graduates from these elite schools justifies their staggering client billing rates. In truth, their clients are often paying top dollar for poorly prepared lawyers. They are learning the law on the client’s dime, not in law school. Clients often pay for lawyers who studied useless ideologically-saturated topics like the ones we will detail in these forthcoming articles.

Simply, lawyers from so-called “lesser” law schools are likely to be better trained to practice law in court and represent clients than the ones graduating from elite law schools.

This is basically true. And when I visited at UVA many years ago, Bill Stuntz, the chair of the hiring committee that year, told me that he didn’t like to hire people fresh out of Yale Law because “they don’t know any law.” It’s a fair cop. The excuse that the Yale professors used was that Yale Law students are so smart, they don’t need professors to teach them the law. This was appealingly flattering as a student, but as a law professor now I recognize it for the copout it was.