It turns out that admissions at the state’s top law school are influenced by politics. Who knew?

Some of the least-qualified graduates of the University of Texas School of Law in recent years have high-level connections in the Legislature, which may explain how they got into the prestigious law school in the first place.

A months-long Watchdog.org analysis of political influence on the admissions process at UT Law found there’s some truth, after all, to the old line about who you know mattering more than what you know. We found dozens of Longhorns who don’t know enough to be lawyers but know somebody important in the Legislature.

Two of those mediocre students are legislators themselves.

It’s not even exclusive to one party or the other.

Where I’m not sure they’re right is in their apparent correlation between qualifications to go to law school and bar exam passage rates. One could argue that those are two separate things, as least where UT Law School is concerned.

I did not learn all that much about the practice of law during my three years there—to paraphrase somebody whose name eludes me, I learned a great deal about Law, but not many laws. I learned some practical law while studying for the bar, and the rest was trial by fire once I started practicing. Getting into law school does not mean that one should actually be a lawyer

Besides that, my LSAT score was pretty stellar (97th percentile, if I recall correctly), but my law school grades were nothing to get excited about. I think I barely squeezed past a 3.0, but my main interest was just in graduating. As for the bar exam, no one really cares what your actual score was. You need a 675 out of 1,000 to pass, and I got more than 675. These are the only indicators anyone has ahead of time to predict whether someone would make a good lawyer, but they don’t tell you much of anything, really.

Plus, the bar exam is hard, yo. If I couldn’t devote several months to studying more than full-time, I’m not sure I could’ve passed it.

And for the record, I think I was a decent lawyer. I just hated doing it.

Photo credit: By Unknown. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.