The Comprehensive Directory of Law School Honors & Awards

Index of Awards

An alphabetical index of every honor, prize, scholarship, fellowship, journal credential, advocacy distinction, and honor society discussed in this directory. Click any entry to jump to its full description.

How to Read This Directory

Law school honors come in five families. Sophisticated readers — BigLaw hiring partners, federal judges, in-house general counsel, and lateral recruiters — weight them in roughly this order:

• Academic rank honors (Order of the Coif, Latin honors, class rank) — the dominant signal
• Journal credentials (flagship law review > top specialty journals > secondary journals)
• Advocacy distinctions (moot court board, top national competitions, Order of Barristers)
• Named scholarships and post-graduate fellowships (Rubenstein, Hamilton, Darrow, Skadden, EJW)
• Course-level and service awards (CALI / Am Jur book awards, pro bono honors, dean's list)

Tier 1Class-Wide Academic Honors

Order of the Coif

The single most prestigious purely-academic honor in American legal education — the law-school analog to Phi Beta Kappa (William & Mary Law School, SUNY Buffalo Law).

• Founded: 1902 in the U.S.; national society formalized in 1912
• Eligibility: Top 10% of the graduating class at a Coif-chapter school, with at least 75% of credits taken in graded courses (Order of the Coif national constitution, via University of Houston; UC Berkeley Law)
• Key constraint: Only graduates of Coif-member schools are eligible. There are roughly 80+ chapters; non-chapter schools (including some respected ones) cannot induct members at all (Encyclopedia.com)
• Notable non-chapters: Yale Law School and Harvard Law School do not have Coif chapters. Stanford discontinued awarding the Coif effective with the class of 2010 (Stanford Law FAQ).
• Why it matters: Because the 75% graded-credits rule prevents "gaming" with pass/fail electives, Coif is a cleaner top-10% signal than Latin honors at many schools.

Latin Honors (summa / magna / cum laude)

School-specific GPA or class-rank cutoffs. Thresholds vary considerably:

Valedictorian / Salutatorian / Class Rank Numerical

At schools that publish rank, "#1 in class" or "top 5/10/N" is the cleanest possible signal. Many elite schools (Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, NYU, Columbia, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Northwestern) decline to rank — there, Coif + Latin honors carry the signaling load. A few schools award the Valedictorian and Salutatorian designations to the top two GPAs in each division (full-time/part-time), as at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School.

Top-Percentile Disclosure Policies

Even schools that "don't rank" often publish percentile cutoff GPAs for the top 10%, 25%, and 33% — so that employers, clerkship judges, and Coif eligibility committees have a working number. Notre Dame, Minnesota, and Boston College each follow this practice. Some schools (BYU) keep rankings internal under FERPA but release them to students who request them.

Dean's List / Dean's Honors List

Semester-by-semester recognition. Cutoffs vary: top 5% of the term (Rutgers Law Dean's Scholars), top 20% per division (Widener Delaware Law), or GPA-based thresholds like 3.5+ (SLU Law, Wisconsin Law). Mid-tier signal — appears on transcripts but carries less weight than cumulative honors.

Apex Single-Student Academic Prizes

A handful of schools award the highest single-student honors in American legal education:

• Harvard Fay Diploma — awarded to the single graduate with the highest three-year GPA. The highest individual academic honor in American law and one of the rarest credentials (Harvard Law School).
• Harvard Sears Prize — awarded each year to the two students with the highest GPAs at the end of the 1L and 2L years. Approximately four current students hold a Sears Prize at any time (HLS Honors).
• Yale Florence M. Allen Prize & school prizes — Yale rejects GPA-based honors but awards a small number of named graduation prizes for legal scholarship and writing.
• Chicago Casper Platt Award — for the best paper by a JD candidate (UChicago Law).
• Columbia E.B. Convers Prize — best original essay on a legal subject by a graduating student (Columbia Law).
• Stanford Urban A. Sontheimer Honor — historically the second-highest GPA in the class.

Tier 2Journals & Publications

Flagship "Law Review" Membership

Membership on the main law review is the single most-recognized non-grade credential in American law. Selection is via some combination of:

• Grade-on: Automatic invitation for top-ranked 1Ls (e.g., Chicago invites 20 by grade-on, 30 by write-on; UChicago Law Review)
• Write-on: A multi-day blind competition with a case comment, citation/Bluebook exercise, and sometimes a personal statement — typically held immediately after 1L finals (Harvard Law Review writing competition, Georgetown Write-On guide)
• Holistic / diversity track: Anonymous review of expository statements alongside competition scores (Harvard Law Review)
• Yale model: Pure writing competition with no grade component — Yale's reviews place writing competition above all else.

Editorial Board Hierarchy (Descending Prestige Within a Journal)

• Editor-in-Chief (EIC) — elected by membership; the single most prestigious student position in any law school
• Managing Editor / Executive Editor(s) — runs production
• Articles Editor / Senior Articles Editor — selects and edits faculty submissions
• Notes & Comments Editor — manages student writing
• Symposium Editor, Online Editor, Diversity Editor, Circuit Editor (e.g., Eleventh Circuit Editor at Miami)
• Senior Staff Editor / 3L Editor — second-year promotion
• Staff Editor / Associate / 2L Member — entry rank

Publishing a student Note or Comment in the flagship is itself a credential — significantly more so than mere membership, because it survives as a citable Westlaw/Lexis entry.

Journal Prestige Hierarchy (the working "TJAGLCS scale")

A widely-cited prestige ordering of legal publications (The Judge Advocate General's Legal Center & School):

• Primary law reviews of top-20 ranked law schools
• Leading peer-reviewed legal journals (e.g., Journal of Legal Studies, Supreme Court Review)
• Primary law reviews of top-50 schools
• Top-10 specialty journals in their field
• Primary law reviews of top-100 schools
• All other primary and specialty journals

Specialty/secondary journal rule of thumb: "Take the school's ranking and add 25–50 to estimate the specialty journal's national rank." Exceptions exist where the specialty journal is itself field-leading — the American Journal of International Law and American Journal of Comparative Law are both treated as roughly equivalent to top flagship reviews.

Common Specialty / Secondary Journals

Almost every school has 2–6 secondary journals. Categories include:

• International / Comparative law — Harvard ILJ, Chicago JIL, Virginia JIL, Columbia JTL, NYU JILP
• Business / Corporate law — Delaware J. Corp. Law, Penn J. Bus. Law, Columbia Bus. L. Rev., NYU J. Law & Bus.
• Technology / IP — Harvard JOLT, Berkeley Tech. L.J., Stanford Tech. L. Rev., NYU JIPEL
• Civil rights / Race / Gender — Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Michigan J. Race & Law, Columbia J. Gender & Law
• Environmental, Tax, Health, Criminal, Labor & Employment, Constitutional specialty journals

Other Publication Honors

• Best Note / Best Comment Award — given annually by many journals to the top student-authored piece (e.g., NYU's Paul D. Kaufman Memorial Award for best Law Review note)
• Burton Award for Legal Writing — national award for distinguished legal writing, sometimes awarded to student authors (The Burton Awards)
• Scribes Brief-Writing Award — given annually by Scribes — The American Society of Legal Writers, recognizing the best student briefs in interscholastic moot court competitions (Scribes)

Tier 3Advocacy: Moot Court, Mock Trial, ADR

Moot Court Board / Honor Board Membership

The standard appellate-advocacy credential. Selection is performance-based via the school's intramural competitions — for example, Duke's Hardt Cup → Dean's Cup → Jessup Cup pipeline (Duke Law). Notre Dame's board is capped at 30 oralists and 10 brief writers, selected by committee (Notre Dame Moot Court bylaws). Harvard's Ames Moot Court Competition and Board of Student Advisers (BSA) are among the most prestigious in the country.

Top National & International Moot Court Competitions

Recognized by sophisticated litigators and federal judges:

The University of Houston Law Center maintains the authoritative Blakely Advocacy Institute annual moot court program rankings.

Mock Trial / Trial Advocacy

A distinct credential from moot court — moot court is appellate (briefs + oral argument on legal questions); mock trial is full trial advocacy (witness exam, evidence, opening/closing).

Best Advocate / Best Brief individual awards at any of the above are significant résumé items. Texas Tech School of Law became the first school to win all five ABA Championship categories — arbitration, negotiation, client counseling, mediation, and appellate — in 2025.

Order of Barristers

The advocacy-side counterpart to the Order of the Coif. A national honor society recognizing graduating students who excelled in moot court, mock trial, brief writing, and oral advocacy programs. Up to 8–10 students per chapter per year; selection by faculty committee with the dean's approval (Order of Barristers Constitution, via Seattle U, William & Mary Law, Texas Law).

ADR & Transactional Competitions

Lower individual prestige than the top moots and mock trials, but increasingly recognized for transactional and litigation hires — especially in the new "transactional moot court" tradition:

• ABA Negotiation Competition (ABA Law Student Division)
• ABA Client Counseling Competition — administered since 1973; ~100 schools annually (UIUC ABA CCC). Most recent national champion: University of Nebraska College of Law (UNL News).
• ABA Representation in Mediation Competition
• ABA Arbitration Competition
• National Transactional LawMeet® — the "transactional moot court"; up to 84 teams across 7 regional meets, founded by Drexel Law (UCLA Lowell Milken Institute). KU Law has won the Best Draft award three years running (KU News).
• American College of Bankruptcy LawMeet — biennial; the ACB is itself an invitation-only honorary society of ~800 bankruptcy professionals
• ABA Business Law Section MAC Cup — recent winner BYU Law (BYU Law)
• The Closer (Baylor Law) — $10,000 prize pool transactional negotiation competition (Baylor Law)
• Wayne State Taft Transactional Law Invitational — drafting + negotiation

Tier 4Named Scholarships & Fellowships

Pre-Matriculation Named Scholarships (Merit Full-Rides)

These are awarded with the admissions decision and serve as a permanent credential signaling that the student was among the school's top admits.

These signal "top 1–5% of admitted class" and are credited by some clerkship judges as informal LSAT/UGPA proxies.

Post-Graduate Public Interest & Government Fellowships

Among the most prestigious credentials a graduating law student can earn — in some recruiter contexts, equivalent to a federal appellate clerkship for public-interest careers.

• Skadden Fellowship — sponsored by Skadden, Arps; ~28 fellows/year out of ~100 semifinalists from a large applicant pool; two-year fully-funded public interest project (Skadden Fellowship Foundation). Often described as "the public-interest world's version of Supreme Court clerkships" (David Lat, Original Jurisdiction). Since the program launched in 1988, ~960+ Fellows have been funded.
• Equal Justice Works Fellowship — 50–60 fellows/year; two-year fully-funded public-interest fellowship; sponsors include Am Law 200 firms and Fortune 500 companies (Equal Justice Works)
• Soros Justice Fellowship — Open Society Foundations; 12–18 month criminal-justice reform fellowship; advocacy, media, or scholarly tracks
• Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship (Yale) — one year for YLS graduates working on welfare, homelessness, indigent defense, juvenile justice (Yale Law)
• Bristow Fellowship (U.S. Solicitor General's Office) — four fellows/year; one-year post-clerkship academic-track honor; supreme-court litigation experience
• Heyman Federal Public Service Fellowship (Yale) — works with high-level federal-government leaders for one year
• Gruber Fellowships in Global Justice and Women's Rights (Yale)
• Mary A. McCarthy Fellowship (Yale) — short-term post-grad public-interest project funding
• Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship (Yale) — one year of human-rights work
• Robina Foundation Human Rights Fellowships (Yale)
• Yale Public Interest Fellowships (YPIF) — one year on YLS-graduate-designed public-interest projects
• Justice Catalyst Fellowship — one-year project-based fellowship for boundary-pushing systemic-change work
• Tom Steel Post-Graduate Fellowship — one-year LGBT public-interest fellowship via Pride Law Fund
• Echoing Green Fellowship — two-year social-entrepreneur fellowship; JDs eligible
• ACLU Fellowships — National Prison Project; Civil Liberties & National Security Applied Research; Glasser Racial Justice
• Sandler / Human Rights Watch Fellowship
• Immigrant Justice Corps Fellowship
• Singer Social Justice Fellowship (Columbia)
• Climenko (Harvard), Bigelow (Chicago), Sharswood (Penn) Fellowships — teaching fellowships at elite law schools; academic-track signal

Federal Judicial Clerkships

Not strictly an in-school honor, but secured almost exclusively by students with top academic + journal credentials. The signaling hierarchy:

• U.S. Supreme Court clerkship (post-COA)
• U.S. Court of Appeals (feeder judges) — e.g., D.C., 2nd, 9th, 4th Circuits
• Other federal Court of Appeals
• U.S. District Court
• State supreme court / specialty courts (Delaware Chancery, etc.)

Tier 5Course-Level & Service Awards

CALI Excellence for the Future Award® ("CALI Award" / "I CALI'd a Class")

Awarded to the student with the highest grade in each individual course. Faculty (or registrar) name the recipient; each gets a printed certificate and a permanent virtual award URL (CALI Awards, CALI FAQ, Mizzou Law). Multiple CALI awards (3+) become a real cumulative signal of subject-matter mastery.

American Jurisprudence (Am Jur) Book Award

The historical predecessor to the CALI Award — West Publishing originally gave the top student in each class the relevant American Jurisprudence encyclopedia volumes (literal "books"), which is the origin of the law-school slang "booking a class" = getting the top grade. Many schools still award Am Jur certificates alongside or instead of CALI.

Other "Highest Grade" / Named Course Awards

• West Award — successor to Am Jur at many schools
• Faculty-named subject awards (e.g., "Excellence in Study of Criminal Law", Cornell's Boardman Third-Year Law Prize) — typically conferred for highest grade or by faculty selection
• Sindell Torts Prize, Norma & Larry Zukerman Prize (Criminal Law) — Case Western (CWRU)
• Best Brief / Best Oralist in 1L Legal Writing programs
• 1L Section Prizes (e.g., NYU's Pomeroy, Butler, Florence Allen, and Robert McKay Scholars — named designations for the top-ranked 1L in each section, used as a class-rank proxy at non-ranking schools)

Pro Bono Honors

Hours-based recognition at most schools. Representative tiers:

Students who hit top tiers wear honors cords at graduation. The AALS maintains a national Annual Pro Bono Honor Roll for participating schools. Stanford's Levin Center awards Pro Bono Distinction at three levels: Highest (300+ hours), High (150+), and Pro Bono Distinction (50+).

Clinical Honors

• CLEA Outstanding Clinical Student Award — given by the Clinical Legal Education Association; one student per participating school (CLEA)
• CLEA Outstanding Externship Student Award
• School-specific Excellence in Clinical Education Award(s) — e.g., Baltimore Law recognizes up to three students/year for advocacy and professional judgment in clinical work

Dean's Fellow / Teaching Fellow / Research Assistant

• Dean's Fellow — at many schools, an academic-support TA role for 1L doctrinal courses; selection based on grades + faculty rec (Miami Law, GW Law)
• Research Assistantship (RA) — paid research for a faculty member; informal but high-signal for academia/clerkship tracks
• Teaching Assistant for legal writing or doctrinal courses

Honor Societies (Distinct from Order of the Coif / Barristers)

Phi Delta Phi (ΦΔΦ) — The International Legal Honor Society

• Founded: 1869 at the University of Michigan — oldest legal society in continuous existence in the U.S., predating the ABA (Phi Delta Phi)
• Status: Originally a professional fraternity; converted to honor society in 2012
• Requirement: Generally top one-third of class or comparable scholarly/service standard (Phi Delta Phi membership)
• Signal: Mid-tier. Lifetime membership fee; critics view it as "pay to put on résumé" unless the student is active in the chapter (Inn). Alumni include 5 U.S. Presidents and 14 Supreme Court Justices.
• Organization: Chapters called "Inns"; named for noted jurists (e.g., NYU's Field Inn)

Phi Alpha Delta (ΦΑΔ) — Law Fraternity

• Status: Professional law fraternity (not an honor society in the strict sense), but its Society of Scholars is an honors program for members in the top third of class or 3.5+ pre-law GPA (PAD Society of Scholars)
• Size: Largest legal fraternity globally — 270,000+ initiated members
• Signal: Low — broadly seen as a networking organization rather than an honor

Delta Theta Phi (ΔΘΦ)

Third major legal fraternity, ~136,000 members; publishes a law journal. Low signaling value.

School-Specific Honor Societies

Many schools maintain in-house honor societies that meaningfully impact résumés within those institutions:

• Brooklyn Law ADR Honor Society — top ADR competitors (Brooklyn Law)
• USF McAuliffe Honor Society — top 1L performers
• Order of the Wig and Robe — varies by school
• Northwestern Wigmore Key — graduating student who has "done the most to uphold the traditions of the Law School"
• Thomas Swan Barristers' Union (Yale) — trial advocacy honor
• Harvard Board of Student Advisers — selection from Ames Moot Court finalists; provides 1L research, writing, and advocacy instruction

School-Specific Signature Awards

Drawn from the Top 25 schools profiled in the companion appendix, these are the named graduation prizes most likely to appear on a top-tier candidate's résumé:

Reading Honors on a Résumé — Recruiter Quick-Reference

When evaluating an attorney for lateral, in-house, or partner-track BigLaw placement, the signal weights tend to break down as follows: