What is New York Law School like?

Loan debt is more important than ranking. Region of law school matters most in your job search. Don't go to a Big East law school (Harvard & Yale excepted) is you plan to look for a job in the midwest or southwest. Particularly not if you will incur big debt. If you want to stay in New York, go to the best NY law school that accepts you AND that will leave you with the lowest loan burden when you graduate. You have no idea where you will rank in the class and no idea if you will like being a lawyer. Law school is a far bigger crap shoot than people think (and than it's advertised as being); go into as little debt as possible. I like being a lawyer; I went to a Big East law school. My loan debt is crippling; my GPA was at the bottom top-third (not high enough for honors, basically, but high enough that I get to say "top third" of my class); I was an editor on law review; I clerked. Nonetheless, it took me four years to get hired in the midwest and my law school loans rival my mortgage payment. I would have been far better off taking the scholarship at the well-respected local law school than I was going to the top-tier nonlocal without a decent scholarship.

2L at HYS here. There is some very good advice offered above that I won't repeat, but I'll add a few things to consider. Many schools (though I don't know if NYLS is one of them) play fast and loose with the scholarships they award, particularly when they are based on a certain GPA cut-off. One popular tactic is to shuffle a significant portion of scholarship recipients into the same section, so as to make it more difficult for all of them to qualify for renewed scholarship come next year. Also, be very careful about assuming that you'll do well enough to maintain a certain GPA, graduate in certain percentage, etc. - if you are like most law school students, you will quickly find that amount of effort and grade results do not correlate strongly. Do recognize that law is a very hierarchical and rankings-obsessed profession. The problem that results from that is that the starting salary is esentially a bimodal distribution (see http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2007/09/distribution-of.html). Realistically speaking, irrespective of your personal abilities as a lawyer, graduating from NYLS is substantially more likely to land you on the losing side of that distribution. Starting at a $40-60k/year salary will make paying loans a terrible burden, even if the loan amount will be mitigated somewhat by your $20k/year x 3 years scholarship. Do try to decide now what you want to do with your law degree. You mention intellectual property law, public interest law, and administrative law. IP is a tough field to break into without a technical background even for higher-ranked schools, and is almost exclusively the province of BigLaw and IP boutique firms (two categories that may turn their nose up at NYLS graduates, again, unfairly). Public interest, however, may certainly be a viable option coming out of NYLS. This is likely to be an unpopular piece of advice and one that you may not want to hear, but strongly reconsider retaking the LSAT, reapplying to law schools, and only attending if you get into one of the top 20 schools. (The reporting requirements for law schools have changed recently, and as a result, most schools now take the highest LSAT score rather than averaging them.) Even a fairly small increase in your LSAT score can mean a significant difference in the schools that accept you, and in the scholarships they may offer. I may be very risk-averse, but it is just a fact that once you start going outside the top 20-30 or so schools, the likelihood of obtaining a job that will make it easy to pay off your loans decreases substantially, while the total loan amount is likely to say roughly the same. Three years of your life and a hundred thousand dollars in loans is a very high price to pay, so it is not a choice that should be made rashly. Freel free to MeFiMail me if you have any questions.

Go to the highest ranked school that you can, otherwise (especially in the dwindling economy), you run a very real risk of not being able to find a job.

First, wait until the results from other schools come back to make a decision. It's good that you have some idea of what fields you want to go into, but also realize that this changes for a great many students before they graduate. So don't put so much weight on the fact that you think you'll be in those areas. School prestige is so much more important in law than most other fields, so you probably shouldn't discount it just for a scholarship. In fact, I want to tell you to ignore the scholarship completely when deciding which school to attend, but I realize that's unrealistic. Please remember that the scholarship looks great now, but that many students in even low-paying legal jobs manage to pay back their full tuition loans just fine. Many going into public interest manage to get loan forgiveness. Many assume they'll keep their scholarships but end up losing them after the first year. Scholarships are how lower-ranked schools draw students who could attend better schools, so at least realize what they're thinking. At the same time, if you're definitely going to work in public interest or NYC administrative stuff, NYLS won't be so bad. Hell, it won't even be the end of the world if you do pursue the big corporate law job...it'll just be a lot harder. It'll be that much more important that you finish near the top of your class and make law review. And this is no knock against NYLS. The quality of the education probably isn't much different at all. It's all (well, mostly) reputation. But even if it is nonsense, recruiters still take it into account.

You've probably seen this point beaten to death if you've read other law boards, or even other law posts on AskMefi, but ranking is really what matters. Scholarships do make things attractive at certain schools, but my suggestion (as a 2L at a T25) is that you should only use scholarships as tiebreakers between similarly ranked/situated schools. Even if you don't plan on doing Big Law, a highly ranked school is going to give you the most options by far. It sounds stupid, why would anyone care so much about rankings?, but it holds true. If you do end up in the public interest field with a lot of loans, most schools have loan repayment programs that will take care of you. Good luck.

Youcancallmeal speaks the truth, at least according to my anecdotal evidence. Friends who went to high ranking schools found jobs easily and are now rich and successful. Other who attended mid-level schools had more difficulty finding jobs and are earning a lot less. The second group has mostly ended up finding work outside of law even though they would rather work as a lawyer. This is all in NYC.

It depends if you want a Biglaw job and are confident that you can get one. It also depends what your total loan debt will be upon graduation. I went to a top-tier school, funded completely with loans, and then found myself unemployed when I graduated (I was at the middle of the class). Fast-forward to today, several years later, when I'm working as a document review attorney and barely making a dent in my massive loans. No matter what you do, be extremely careful about your loan debt. If you feel you can hold down a part-time job while in school, do it (though I would recommend against this for 1st year). Don't take any more in loans than you absolutely have to. Sorry if it seems I'm harping on the loan issue, but the unfortunate truth is that I'm sort of trapped in my situation as a result of taking too much of the freely-available student loan money.

crush-onastick: I would have been far better off taking the scholarship at the well-respected local law school than I was going to the top-tier nonlocal without a decent scholarship. I agree.

Congratulations on receiving such a generous scholarship! I think that everyone will agree that you should go to the law school with the highest standing. If you can get into Harvard, then you go to Harvard, etc. On the other hand . . . I also received a scholarship from NYLS back in 1996 when I was app'ing. I lived in Minneapolis and always wanted to live in NYC, so I applied to all of the NYC law schools. I was accepted to NYLS, Brooklyn and my hometown U of MN LS. NYLS was the first to offer me a scholarship of 20k+. Before deciding I called Brooklyn and asked if I was accepted and let it slip that I received the scholarship from NYLS. Brooklyn offered me a full academic scholarship. But then I weighed both scholarships, taking into account the amount of money I would have to borrow for living expenses and compared that to going to the U of MN, a top 20 school only one mile from my house and where it didn't cost a fortune to live. The U of MN was a much better decision based on its standing and the economics. That said, now nine years after graduating I wish that I had gone to Brooklyn or NYLS. I totally regret not sucking it up and living in NYC for those years. At the time I was terrified of the loan debt that I would take on, but even graduating from the U of MN, which at the time cost less than 20K year to attend, I still managed to rack up nearly 100k in student loan debt. All of which I paid off within four years of graduating. Yipee for not having any student loan debt! I do not practice big law firm law and never have. Your academic standing is more important than school standing if you're not seeking those huge, huge & large law firm associate positions. I think that quality of life is highly underrated when making these types of decisions. You have to take into account the intangibles along with the marketability of your law degree. I am in the Army and no one could give a crap what school I went to. I've deployed with Harvard grad judge advocates and they are no better than any other judge advocate. Trust me; a commander doesn't want to know what law school you went to. He wants to know what contracts can be entered into, how can this or that pot of money be spent, can a soldier be punished for this or that, is that a legal target, etc. And he wants those answers fast and accurate, not served to him on top of a law school diploma. And yes, your legal focus will probably change while you’re in law school. Who knows, you could end up loving criminal defense or legal aid, etc. Always keep your options open, don't commit to any school based solely on the area of law that you think you will practice. There is a MeFite who is an attorney headhunter. Perhaps she'll send you an email and give you feedback based on her position recruiting for a huge law firm.