Law.com, Kamala Harris Would Only Be the Second Lawyer-President With a Non-T14 Law Degree:
If Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is elected in November, the Oakland, California, native would be only the second lawyer-president to hold a law degree from a university that is not considered a top-14 law school in the U.S. News & World Report Rankings.
After graduating from Howard University, a historically black college in the Washington, D.C., area, with dual degrees in economics and political science in 1986, Harris went on to earn her law degree from the University of California Hastings College of the Law (which was renamed last year to the University of California College of Law, San Francisco) in 1989. …
UC Law SF ranked No. 82 in 2024 by U.S. News & World Report. The program has a 30.9% acceptance rate and enrolled 1,125 students last year. [David Faigman, chancellor and dean of UC Law SF,] said that he welcomed the incoming 1L class on Aug. 13 and that of the 401 new students, 50% were women and 54% were people of color.
“I would say our class represents the demographics that Kamala Harris is proud to represent,” Faigman said. Faigman further argued that a degree from a law school that’s not in the T-14 rankings is just as useful as one from Harvard or Yale. …
[T]he majority of presidents who were lawyers did not have a law degree at all, with apprenticeships being the norm until the late 19th century. Only six past lawyer-presidents have graduated from law school, all from what are now T-14 schools, with the exception of current President Joe Biden, who graduated from the Syracuse University College of Law in 1968.
The last president to hold a degree from a T-14 law school was former President Barack Obama, who obtained his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1991. While Obama was the seventh president to attend Harvard, he was only the second to obtain his law degree from the school, following Rutherford B. Hayes in 1845.
Former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton are both graduates of Yale Law School, with Ford earning his J.D. in 1941, ranked in the top third of his class, and Clinton in 1973.
Richard Nixon also holds a law degree from Duke University School of Law, which he obtained in 1937. Nixon is the only graduate of Duke to become president.
Woodrow Wilson attended the University of Virginia Law School and Franklin D. Roosevelt attended Columbia Law, but both ultimately withdrew before graduating.
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