Making Distinctions
Judging from all the email telling me that the best students at SMU are just as smart as students in the Ivy League, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what I've written about SMU, Harriet Miers, and Ivy League schools.
I agree that the best students at SMU are as smart as good students at Ivy League or equivalent schools (students like me, in other words, not supergenius physics majors or folks named Volokh). But that's not the point. Making distinctions is important in the law, so let's try to make a few. This is not an argument about I.Q. The argument about schools is an argument about the value added by those schools, mostly environment and curriculum. The argument about Miers, who graduated from law school 35 years ago, is an argument about intellectual interests, intellectual temperament, and specific legal expertise--and is mostly a guessing game at this point.
If you care about what two equally smart people learn in college, at least two factors make an important difference: who your fellow students are and what the curriculum demands. Will you be around lots of people as smart as or smarter than you and just as hard working? Will they be intellectually curious or just trying to get their tickets punched? While the Ivy League is no Cal Tech, the answer is a lot more likely to be yes at Princeton than at SMU. As for what the syllabi expect, there's no comparison.
Harriet Miers's academic record, as I've written, suggests that she is very smart and was a hard working, serious student. There are lots of other equally smart, equally hard working graduates of hundreds of different law schools. That doesn't make them Supreme Court material. If Miers had a record as a constitutional lawyer, we wouldn't be having this discussion.