Kamala Harris's Law School Alma Mater Looks For PR Boost From Candidate's Run

Reuters, Kamala Harris' Law School Alma Mater Looks For PR Boost From Candidate's Run:

After President Biden chose Kamala Harris as his 2020 running mate and the pair were elected to the nation’s two highest offices, applications to her law school alma mater surged 33%—far outpacing that year’s national 13% increase in law school applicants.

Administrators at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco—which rebranded from the University of California Hastings College of the Law in 2023 and from which Harris graduated in 1989—attributed much of that 2021 gain to Harris’ new national profile.

Harris joins a long list of presidential hopefuls with a law degree on their resumes, but she’s an outlier in having graduated from a school not in the so-called T-14—U.S. News & World Report’s top 14 ranked schools.

Also an outlier is President Joe Biden, an alum of No. 120-ranked Syracuse University College of Law, who in 2020 became the first lawyer-president in a century without a degree from one of those elite law schools. Applications there increased 30% between 2020 and 2021, American Bar Association data shows. A Syracuse Law spokesperson declined to comment on the Biden presidency’s impact on the school.

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