"We're looking for a dimension that goes beyond academic and intellectual concerns, involving demonstrated personal skills," Milligan says.

Although the Harvard admissions office applies highly quantitative standards, it employs no rigid cutoff levels or weighted formulas, and it demands no specific preparation. At Harvard Law, there's no such thing as a pre-law major.

All applicants are required to take the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT), which measures reasoning abilities. While critics charge the test can be culturally biased, the admissions office stands by its value as a common predictor of law school performance.

The point scale on the revised LSAT ranges from 10 to 48, but Harvard will not disclose the mean score for the student body. "We don't want to scare people off." Geraghty explains, saying only that it's "very high." The average score for the entire applicant pool is 39, in the ninety-sixth percentile.

The Law School Admissions Council, the organization that administers the LSAT, also prepares students' academic transcripts for evaluation by the admissions office, converting grade point averages to a standard four point scale. Straight A's from Harvard undergraduates are virtually unheard of, Geraghty notes. The average undergraduate GPA at the Law School is 3.5, but courses receive almost as much scrutiny as grades in the admissions process. Geraghty studies the transcripts to weed out the gut-seekers from the achievers, and she says she's familiar with the course offerings at 20 to 30 schools.

The application essay gives candidates their only opportunity to personalize an otherwise quantitative file of information. "Present yourself and your qualifications as you wish in a brief statement below," the form directs, allowing two pages for the response. Geraghty notes that students who begin along the lines of "Law is an integral part of modern democratic society" tend to fare poorly in the final judgment.

The application also includes two letters of recommendation and an official certification form submitted by the applicant's college, all of which figure into the complex deliberations of the admissions office.

In the end, Harvard is able to hand-pick its students to a degree unmatched by any other law school. And very few people turn down an offer to join the original paper chase.