Welcome to Personal Statement Examples, a collection of the most outstanding law school admission essays submitted to top schools over the last decade and a half.
Since 2000, the authors of this website—one an attorney and the other a writing professor—have guided more than a thousand law school hopefuls through the process of writing an exceptional law school personal statement. Our clients have gained admission to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, and every other top-ranked law school in the United States.
Now we have compiled some of the finest examples of those essays to help and inspire you with your own statement. Each of the essays offered here successfully earned their author admission to the school of their choice, and most also garnered scholarship offers.
But, of course, simply reading great essays isn’t going to teach you how to write one (no more than reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald will make you a great novelist). That’s why we’ve annotated the essays to help you understand exactly how they work. We break down each personal statement to show you how it was made and why it was so effective.
Each bundle of essays has been carefully selected to illustrate a key writing principle. Included in each bundle is an in-depth explanation of that principle as well as annotated notes to help you see how the principle is applied in each essay. We have tried to distill the most effective techniques from over the last decade and a half so that you can put them to use in writing your own unique, highly effective personal statement.
A Word of Warning:
These essays are intended to help teach and inspire you in the creation of your own law school personal statement. Do not, for any reason, copy any part of these (or any other) essays. Besides being entirely unethical, such plagiarism would also make a poor writing strategy. The first requirement of an effective personal statement is that it be personal, meaning that it tells a story only you can tell, in a way that only you can tell it. Stealing from someone else’s story will not help you tell your own.