1. Very small number of LLM students they take in per year.

2. Very strong expectation (from what I understand) that selected students will become academics.

3. Expectations that lead from the above re. quality of scholarship published prior to LLM application etc.

Not really. More prestigious the law school, more difficult to get into.

Yale takes 25-30

Harvard 180-190

Oxford 100-110

Smaller class makes it more competitive but prestigious institutions attract applications from 100 countries

Stanford

NYU

Columbia

UPenn

Cambridge

Georgetown

Michigan

Sydney

Melbourne

NUS

LSE

McGill

York Osgoode Hall

UC Berkeley

UC Davis

Next best in no particular order.

All great expect would remove UC Davis, Sydney and Osgoode Hall from this list. They are a notch below.

For example, in the UC system, UC Berkeley > UCLA > UC Law SF > UC Irvine > UC Davis. For JD, Berkeley is for all practical purposes, the exact same as Harvard/Yale/Columbia/NYU/UMich.

If by that you mean outcomes in US government/politics/judiciary, then yes, I agree. If you mean Biglaw, then there is, in fact, no functional difference between the above. You can check this by going to Linkedin, opening a Biglaw firm page, and seeing which schools their associates are from. The more you see, the more you know. Different firms have different preferences but Harvard and Yale absolutely do not dominate in this sphere. Many Biglaw firms have majority NYU, many have majority UMich, many have majority Harvard, and so on.

Yale takes about 20-25 student every year. It is also the highest ranked US law school so is the most prestigious. It prefers students who can show a demonstrated interest in academia or public service related professions for LLM admissions. So it gets a lot of applications, it is hyper competitive, and it generally takes only people with many years of experience (I know of only 3 people who have got into the LLM directly from UG from India and all of them are now academics). That's why it is so tough to get into.

Okay but prestige between harvard yale oxford and even stanford I would say is about the same. So the harder school to get into would be the one with the smallest cohort which is yale. Stanford takes something like 60 people. NYU, Columbia and others take huge cohorts. U Chicago I think only takes 90 people.

Besides we're not talking about undergraduate degrees in the arts. we're talking about graduate programmes in law. I would even argue that it should be programme-specific. NYU has a legal theory programme thats very difficult to get into and takes only 15 people and funds them well enough. thats wayyy harder to get into than Harvard or Oxford.

Getting into SPILS at Stanford is way harder than getting into the other tracks. Spils is the only one with funding and pathway to the JSD. Thats harder to get into than Oxford or Harvard I would think.

Studying law and economics at U Chicago would give you much more credibility than studying law and economics at NYU. And studying law and gender at berkeley would probably be better than studying law and gender at Harvard or NYU or Chicago or Yale or Stanford or Oxford even.

All of these programmes get applicants from across the world.