How to Get Into Harvard Law: The Ultimate Guide
/How hard is it to get into Harvard Law? Everything you need to know: acceptance rates, admissions requirements, and essays (including examples)
LEARN HOW TO GET INTO HARVARD LAW
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Part 1: Introduction
If you’re applying to law school, you know the two most important parts of your application are your LSAT score and your undergraduate grades.
Those two quantitative aspects of your profile matter an enormous amount not only in whether or not you’re a competitive candidate for law school at all, but also in whether or not you stand a chance at the top law schools: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, UChicago, NYU, and others.
There’s a reason so many people are aching to know how to get into Harvard Law. It’s attached to one of the best universities in the world and many HLS students have gone on to reign in the highest tiers of American and global society, serving as Presidents or Supreme Court Justices, earning staggering salaries and making major corporate impact in white shoe law firms, and winning Pulitzer Prizes as journalists and commentators.
In this post, we’ll set down much of what you need to know about how to get into Harvard Law School, including information about the Harvard Law School acceptance rate, and the components of the Harvard Law School application.
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Part 2: Harvard Law School programs
You can attend Harvard Law School to earn a Juris Doctor (JD)—the thing you think of as a law school degree, a Master of Laws (LLM)—a one year master’s program meant to complement a JD or equivalent earned abroad, or a doctorate (SJD)—a route to legal academia.
In this article, we’ll focus on the route to traditional JD admissions.
It’s worth noting that thanks to Harvard’s wealth of top-notch graduate programs, many students earn dual degrees.
Common are:
JD-MBA from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, respectively
JD-MPP from Harvard Law School, and the Harvard Kennedy School, respectively
Admission to dual degrees is unsurprisingly competitive, but well-coordinated, since Harvard is no stranger to students pursuing multiple intellectual, academic, and professional paths concurrently.
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Part 3: Harvard Law School admissions statistics
HLS is one of the larger top law schools. Drawing on the class of 2026 (JD candidates):
Class size: 561
Harvard Law School acceptance rate: 9.5%
HLS publishes its class GPA spread:
25th percentile: 3.84/4.0
50th percentile: 3.93/4.0
75th percentile: 3.99/4.0
HLS also publishes its LSAT score spread:
25th percentile: 171/180
50th percentile: 174/180
75th percentile: 176/180
With an acceptance rate higher than Yale or Stanford, which clock in under 10 percent, it may not seem insurmountable, but as you can see, those GPA and LSAT scores are nothing to sneeze at.
That’s why the first thing you need to do to get into Harvard Law School is work hard as an undergraduate, shooting for Latin honors at your college—Cum Laude, or ideally, Magna Cum Laude or Summa Cum Laude.
Then, you should plan to study long enough and intensely enough for the LSAT to achieve a 174 or above for the best odds of getting in.
Finally, you should consider the rest of your resumé and career trajectory. Harvard reports that over 82% of its class is at least one year out of college, and 21% are four or more years out. That data doesn’t tell you what you should do or how many years you should take off between your undergraduate degree and law school, but it indicates that planning for at least one gap year between college and HLS is a solid plan.
As you plan professionally for those interim years, consider the following:
What can or should I do now, between college and law school, that I won’t be able to do after I’ve attended law school (and likely racked up six figures of debt)? Can I, for instance, teach, work as a community organizer, or travel?
On the flip side, should I take a job earning me six figures now to be a public defender after law school?What will give me a good and new perspective on the law? The answer might be paralegal work. But don’t assume your job has to deal directly with the law. The answer might be a year in AmeriCorps or as a Fulbright scholar studying justice in the Philippines. It might be a Master’s in Philosophy or History. It might be two years learning to code in Silicon Valley, then two years working as a project manager, all to prepare you for working in technology law. Or perhaps it’s a year slogging it in the mailroom at an agency in Los Angeles while pursuing comedy at night—maybe that takes you to entertainment law, or maybe the JD starts you on a whole new path.
What path did my legal heroes take? Consider the figures—public personalities or personal mentors—who have made you want to apply to law school in the first place. What path did they take? What can you learn from them about the gap years?
If you’re a junior in college or younger, you can consider applying to HLS’s junior year deferral program that lets you in early and allows built-in gap time.
Harvard Law School application
Once you have your strong scores in hand, it’s time to turn to your Harvard Law School application.
Fast facts about Harvard Law School requirements for admission:
Admissions are rolling. Get your application in earlier (September, when it opens) rather than later (February, when it closes).
You will be interviewed if you’re viewed as a competitive applicant. Not everyone is offered an interview.
You can apply with either an LSAT score or a GRE score, but if you’ve taken the LSAT, law schools can see that, even if you’d prefer to put forward your fantastic GRE score.
You will need:
A resume—Harvard provides examples here.
LSAT/GRE scores.
Two or three recommendation letters; one should be academic.
Character and fitness questions. (This is a component of law school applications that mimics the state bar requirements—this is your chance to disclose any past transgressions. Your law school application is read alongside your bar application, so you need to be sure you’re truthful and open about things now, or they’ll come back to haunt you three years down the line.)
Proof that you attended the undergrad institution you say you did—aka the College Certification
Essays:
Mandatory: law school personal statement—two pages, double-spaced, 11 or 12 pt font.
Optional: law school diversity statement. No length requirements given. More below on whether or not you should write one of these.
Optional: additional information, if relevant. Harvard includes legacy status in this additional information; you might also use this as a space to elaborate on any blemishes on your record, without, of course, making excuses.
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Part 4: Harvard Law School essays (examples included)
Unlike in many other admissions processes, you likely know that in law school admissions, there’s no Common App. Instead, you’ll begin with one core personal statement that tells the story of why you wish to apply to law school, and then carefully adjust each one to fit the appropriate school.
Here, we’ll offer an example that ties a broad story in the Personal Statement to a specific mission: that the writer wants to attend Harvard Law School.
Harvard Law School Personal Statement
Here’s Emily’s Harvard Law School statement.
I moved to Silicon Valley the same year Lean In came out. Everywhere I went at the mid-sized tech company that hired me, I found Sheryl Sandberg and her many imitators’ language stalking me. At all hands’ meetings, people politely applauded announcements of diversity conferences. Once, my boss, an upper-level product manager, told me he’d been asked to nominate someone for a “Ladies in Tech” conference. The conference was not called “Ladies in Tech”—it’s just what my boss said. I wasn’t a programmer at this company. I was a lady in tech, a bizarre appellation that seemed to undercut everything I had worked so hard for as an undergraduate pursuing a double major in Computer Science and History of Science while doing work-study jobs at my college’s Center for Technology and Society.
Initially, I planned to spend two years in the Valley to prepare for a career at the intersection of law, policy, and technology. I loved to tell people about the beautiful similarities between the mathematics that go into solving a complex computer programing problem and the logic that helps us untangle difficult legal questions. I still feel this way about technology. But in the years since, I’ve developed a new mission. My years of seeing Valley companies in a state of both function and dysfunction made me particularly interested in the way labor operates in a tech-infused society.
In my first year out west, I began collaborating with a friend whose STEM credentials had also been boiled down to that “Lady in Tech” status. We launched an organization to help tech companies hire more diverse cohorts of programmers and project managers. We spent two or three nights a week and every weekend coordinating between coding boot camps, two and four-year colleges, and human resources departments at major companies. I was proud of the progress we made, developing two new training programs to prepare coders of all stripes who might not be as adept at navigating headhunting and recruiting processes, and ultimately helping to place hundreds of talented young programmers.
But almost as soon as we placed these coders—many of them women—in their new jobs, my cofounder and I began to hear from them about life in their new companies. There were stories of harassment. Of a male boss using a racial slur at a Christmas party, only to tell our colleague she was being “sensitive.” I knew that simply getting people hired wasn’t going to be enough. We were only encountering problems with labor at some of the highest tiers of socioeconomic privilege—“skilled” workers.
What else was happening thanks to the move fast and break things culture the tech boom had engendered? The years I spent in the Valley slowly revealed more and more problems with the lack of a safety net associated with the gig economy. I briefly worked for a startup that hoped to ensure Artificial Intelligence would be “friendly,” but we were approaching the mission from a position of pure math and science, not with an eye toward the labor disruptions that lay ahead. I often thought of my father, a first-generation college student, who came from a blue-collar family of truckers and factory workers in the Rust Belt. I grew up visiting my grandparents in Toledo. I felt I had begun to embark on a road toward a fairer society by thinking about hiring, but there remains much work to be done to make both technology and the new society it engenders just.
Four years after I moved to the Valley, I decided to apply to Harvard Law School, as was always my dream. I’ve always imagined myself immersing in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and taking advantage of HLS’s relationship with MIT, across the river. I still hope to pursue a career that integrates my longtime background in STEM with my concerns with cyber security, data privacy, and more. But today I want to take my strong foundation in creating technology and apply it to bridging the gap between those who make new tech and those who must write the laws to regulate it. I can see myself spending time in Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program, especially the Science and Engineering Workforce Project that I believe can be a part of affecting change in technology and society for decades to come. More than anything, I want to draw on the worlds that have shaped me, from my family’s Rust Belt roots to my long hours of coding problem sets in college to all I saw go right and wrong through that San Francisco haze. I hope I can bring these concerns to Harvard and come out an empowered attorney.
Some lessons from Emily’s PS:
She slips in autobiographical information rather than moving chronologically. Her family’s background in the Rust Belt is undoubtedly relevant, but it doesn’t become the only topic of her essay. That’s not to say that the essay would suffer if this were the subject, but the fact that she weaves it in naturally helps her have enough space to tell a longer and more complex story of her professional life.
Emily’s story incorporates aspects of injustice and a desire to make a change in the world, both areas in which law can have a meaningful impact. She creates a compelling narrative about how she saw a need, actively tried to make a difference, and realized there is more to be done.
Harvard appears clearly and deliberately but there’s no fawning or preening about it. She doesn’t make Harvard the subject of her essay. She proves herself a worthy Harvard Law candidate mostly by writing clearly and persuasively. This is a secret about how to get into Harvard Law School: don’t tell them how amazing they are. They already know it. Encourage them to want you by articulating your personal story.
Harvard Law School Diversity Statement
Here’s Amin’s Diversity Statement. There’s no length limit given, so Amin opts for a sweet spot range between 300 and 500 words, which is a nice safe territory if ever someone asks you to write an essay without offering guidance on word counts.
Illegals. Terrorists. I heard these two words uttered often growing up in North Carolina. It was the Bush era, and the discourse surrounding immigration may not have been as heated as it is today—George W. Bush, after all, was interested in comprehensive immigration reform, at least in name—but being brown and Muslim and an immigrant in the post-9/11 world was sometimes unpleasant, to say the least. Illegals and terrorists were far from the worst things people called our family.
My father came to the U.S. from Iran after the Revolution, and rarely speaks about his experiences from his life before America. Here in the U.S., he met my mother, a white Midwesterner, because they both taught at the same university. It wasn’t easy for my mother to marry my father; she cut ties with some members of her extremely religious Christian family, and it was too much for my grandmother when my parents gave me a traditional Farsi name, Amin.
I have carried these experiences with me my whole life. One of the things I most look forward to about Harvard Law School is that I imagine I will not be one of the only students with such a history (as I sometimes feel I am attending a small liberal arts college in the south). I hope to attend Harvard because I know that my experiences will contribute to a larger sense of richness and diversity in this class of future leaders in policy and justice.
I hope to attend Harvard because my story touches the stories of so many others, from Tehran to Topeka. At Harvard, I think my lifelong ability to code-switch might become an ability to serve as a discursive bridge between worlds. I know how to speak to the future conservative Supreme Court Justice as well as I know how to speak to the immigration policy activist. I think that in today’s era, such an instinct to be a bridge is increasingly rare.
Amin’s approach works in a number of ways.
He resists and transcends the tropes and pitfalls of the diversity statement. He doesn’t tokenize himself, acting as though he’ll be the only person at Harvard with a multicultural or biracial history. Instead, he identifies himself as someone who will necessarily belong at HLS for exactly the reason he’s sometimes treated as a pariah elsewhere.
That first bullet point would be irrelevant without this one, though: that Amin still manages to make a pitch for himself as a candidate who would contribute to the diversity of the school by turning Harvard’s pre-existing diversity into a strength. He thinks of himself as a bridge, meaning he can help make Harvard’s many component parts speak to each other better.
Final Thoughts
Getting into Harvard Law School will test your abilities academically and creatively but the payoff is well worth the effort.
By studying hard, working diligently to maintain high grades, and crafting engaging essays that paint the full picture of you, you can put forward a top-tier application worthy of one of the best law schools in the nation.
About the Author
Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the Founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting and one of the world's foremost experts on law school admissions. For nearly 20 years, he and his team have helped thousands of students get into law school using his exclusive approach.
THERE'S NO REASON TO STRUGGLE THROUGH THE LAW SCHOOL ADMISSIONS PROCESS ALONE, ESPECIALLY WITH SO MUCH ON THE LINE. SCHEDULE YOUR COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTATION TO ENSURE YOU LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE.