It’s commonplace for One L’s who’ve ranked highly in their class to consider transferring to a more prestigious law school after their first year. Prestige, experience, and career opportunities all play a role in the decision. But what if, based on your first-year GPA, you’d already been guaranteed a spot at, say, Northwestern.

News out of Boston: Stanford’s Larry Lessig is moving to Harvard to become the faculty director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. It’s a return for Lessig. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 2000, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School. The news came via a press release from Harvard.

UPDATE: We’ve received a letter sent by recently-resigned Duquesne law school dean, Don Guter, to Duquesne University President Charles Dougherty. The letter, which appears to also have been disbursed to Guter’s “friends and colleagues,” chronicles his achievements as Dean and then concludes with the following:

Ah, all the news is bad. The markets are down and the law-firm layoffs continue. The latest, courtesy of Mayer Brown:
Despite the current conditions in the worldwide financial markets, Mayer Brown is having a strong year, with an increase in gross revenues. Most of our practice areas are performing well. We have benefited greatly from our practice area and geographic diversity, including our recent merger with JSM in Asia. However, as is the case in all other comparable law firms, some of our practice areas have been adversely affected by the slowdown in economic activity.

Two years ago we had some fun noting that, beginning with the June 2007 LSAT exam, the test would undergo changes. The big change?

Last week, we noted a letter sent to Michigan law students from their career services center urging them to jump all over any offers they’ve received. Susan Guindi, the assistant dean for career services at Michigan law, told the Law Blog: “I think most students are eager to accept, and I think that’s a good idea. There’s no reason to wait. If you’ve met somebody you like, start dancing with them.”

During the Law Blog’s summer associate interview process, we received rejection after rejection after . . . well, you get the picture. And then, finally, in November, after three humbling months of what seemed like non-stop palm-pressing, a couple of offers came through the clouds. We returned to the firm we liked, met a few more people, and accepted on the spot.

According to the ABA, 2009 will see nearly 44,000 fresh-faced law school grads carrying an average debt load of about $73,000 in loan debt. But, as the NLJ notes today, only a small fraction will land the big firm job, leaving the rest to wonder whether they’ll find “any kind of attorney work” post-graduation.

Students walk through the Harvard Law School area on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2002. (AP/Chitose Suzuki)

Despite the lofty status that Harvard law school enjoys in the collective legal consciousness, and the case-method legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell, it is actually Yale law that has long dominated the field, at least so far as U.S. News is concerned.

You buy a hat like this, I’ll bet you get a free bowl of soup. — Rodney Dangerfield, “Caddyshack“