Pushkin. April twenty fourth, two thousand and nine, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is speaking at American University's Washington College of Law. Thank you, thank you very much, Professor Marcus Dean Grossman, Ladies and gentlemen, I began one of one of my either talks. The students are all dressed up for the occasion. C Span is recording. There's a big stage hung with blue polyester drapes. Scalia holds forth, his black hair swept back from his forehead, glasses on his nose, strong and square, all intellectual heft and force, gripping the podium like it's a slab of beef. That administrative law is not for sissies. It is. It is a very difficult course to teach, and I assume certainly wasn't my day a hard course to master. It's vintage Scalia. The audience hangs on his every word. He finishes triumphantly, then hands shoot in the air. Good afternoon. My name is Christina, said, I'm a one else student here at WCL. Christina stud first year student. Have a more general question, and that is the part of American The American ethos is that our society is a meritocracy. Were hard work and talently to success, but there are other important factors like connections and elite degrees. And I'm wondering, other than grades a journal, what do smart, hardworking, wcale students with strong writing skills need to do to be outrageously successful in the law. What does it take to be outrageously successful in the law? Just work hard and be very good. I tell your story. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked I Misunderstood. This episode is part two of my examination of the bizarre things the legal profession does to pick its best and brightest. In part one, which if you haven't listened to you probably should, I took the law school admissions test along with my assistant Camille and couldn't understand why they made me rush through all the questions. But now in part two we have bigger fish to fry. I'm going to serve up Malcolm Gladwell's grand unified theory of how to fix American legal education. No, make that my grand unified theory for fixing all American higher education. And what is our text for this discussion of Gladwell's grand unified theory. It's the answer Justice Scalia gave to the unfortunate Christina stud you know, buy and large. Unless I have a professor on the faculty who's a good friend and preferably a former law clerk of mine whose judgment I can trust, I'm going to be picking, you know, for Supreme Court law clerks. I can't afford a miss I just can't. So I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically there are the hardest to get into. They admit the best in the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can't make you You can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. And if they come in the best in the brightest, they're probably going to leave the best in the brightest. Okay, let's pretend to be fine legal minds for a moment and closely part the meaning and implication of Scaliah's statement. A student at American University's Washington College of Law, a law school that US News and Will Report ranked seventy seventh among all American law schools, is asking a question of a sitting justice of the US Supreme Court who graduated from Harvard Law School. She's basically asking him would it be possible to be one of his clerks, and he answers, you go to American Universiti's Washington College of Law, you have no chance of becoming one of my clerks. I only hired people who went to Harvard like I did. But then he goes on and he says this, which is my favorite part because it sums up absolutely everything I want to talk about in this episode. I mean everything now I started. The reason I tell the story is one of my former clerks who I am the most proud of it now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Jeff Sutton. I always referred him as one of my former law He wasn't one of my former law He was Lewis Powell's clerk at the time. Lewis Powell was semi retired from the Supreme Court. He had what's called senior status, so his law clerks worked mostly for other justices. But I wouldn't have hired Jeff Sutton for God's sake. He went to Ohio State and he's one of the very best law clerks I ever had. And he's just a brilliant guy. So don't tell me this stuff about you know, what do you have to do to be successful? You have to be good? Simple? Is that? Okay? I think we're done, Thank you very much. Oh we're not done. We've only just begun. Tell me why you decided to go to law school? WHOA So? Law school was a third choice. First choice was teaching. I was a teacher in coach for several years, both middle school, high school, soccer, baseball, little track. This is Judge Jeffrey Sutton, the guy who somehow slipped through the cracks to become the best clerk and n in Scalia ever. Had Foreign service was choice number two. No lawyers in my family, And when I finally went to law school, I wouldn't say my parents were beaming with pride. I came from a family of kind of service driven folks who were either in education some missionaries. And why did you decide to go to Ohio State Law school? Well, it was a pretty complicated decision. I applied to two law schools, Ohio State in Michigan. I got into one of them, and I ended up enrolling at the one I got into. Oh I see that I very much would have liked to have gone to Michigan, and I was the fact that my father in law had gone there and his son in law couldn't get in was a little humbling, but we got over it. I didn't ask Judge Sutton what his elsat's score was, but we can do the math. Michigan is part of the elite group of law schools known as the T fourteen, the top fourteen Yale, Stanford, Harvard, University of Chicago, Columbia, all the big ones. Ohio State is not among the T fourteen. The median elsat's score of someone who goes to Ohio State these days is eight points lower than the median score of someone at Michigan. Now what does that fact mean. Well, as you may recall from the previous episode, the ELSATT is not a test of someone's ability to solve difficult problems. It's a test of someone's ability to solve difficult problems quickly. It is five sections of twenty to twenty five questions, and you have a hard limit of thirty five minutes for each section you have to rush. As one ELSAT tutor told me, the test favors those capable of processing without understanding it favors heirs, not tortoises. So what's Jeff Sutton. Well, he's clearly brilliant. He was the Ohio State Solicitor in the nineteen nineties and wild the Supreme Court with his arguments on a number of cases. His most recent work of legal scholarship is titled fifty one Imperfect Solutions, States and the Making of Constitutional Law. The New York Review of Books felt they had to get a retired Supreme Court justice to review it. There are lots of very serious people, in fact, who think Sutton deserves to be a Supreme Court justice himself one day. So Sutton is in the category of brilliant person who didn't do all that well on the l side. What does that make him? It makes him a tortoise, and not just any tortoise, a giant tortoise. He's one of those tortoises from the Galapa Ghost that's five feet long. So Sutton graduates from Ohio State, gets a job clerking for a federal judge, then a job clerking on the Supreme Court, and in his year as clerk for Scalia, he thrives. The thing that really affects everybody who works with him is within weeks, you just get a sense of this incredible passion for the law, and that is just intoxicating. And that is what really changed things. And that year. I can't emphasize enough how much I got out of that year. Not long before, Jeffrey Sutton had been a middle school teacher and track coach in Columbus. Now he's working with one of the greatest legal minds in the country, and he does such a good job that seventeen years later, at some random speech at American University, Scalia singles him out. Scalia had well over a hundred clerks, jeff Sutton is the one he's proudest of. So why does a tortoise do so well working for the Supreme Court? I asked my fanciest legal friend, Tally for Hadien, who was a clerk on the Court a few years after Sutton for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, See, if you were working on a case, what is working on a case mean? Well, we worked on two kinds of cases. The first kind is what's called the sert pool, the thousands of petitions sent to Washington every year by people who want their cases heard by the Supreme Court. We would each get a stack of petitions I think on a Wednesday, and we had a week to get how would get into the pool? Yeah, so that in that case there will be a lot to read, a lot to read. When you read those kinds of things, How do you read? How do you read? I don't know what that question? Do you read the same way you read a work of nonfiction or a New Yorker article or well? I always read them, and I continue to read similar documents with a pencil in my hand, which is not how I would read for pleasure, whether nonfiction or fiction. Slower or faster? Much slower, much slower, yes, how much slower? Personally I feel I can read very quickly, and I can read very slowly, and I get different things out of it. But this is definitely slow reading territory. Is slow reading territory. And why is it so important to read slowly? Because the details matter and because the arguments are intricate, Yeah, and because the solutions are difficult. I mean, everybody will tell you this. When a case comes to the Supreme Court. You know a case that's really ready for a review with the Supreme Court, it's hard the reason the circuit courts have disagreed about it is because it's really hard, Like the answer is not obvious. Yeah, you're kidding yourself if you think that it is. So you have to you have to think while you read. Yeah. Yeah, you can't just process. You have to understand. Yes, yeah, you have to think while you read. This is the primary requirement of one of the most prestigious jobs in the legal profession. The other part of the job, the main part of the job, is researching and analyzing the actual cases that come before the court. For Hadian was one of four clerks working for O'Connor, so she would get assigned a quarter of those cases. And how much time would you spend on them? I don't think I ever stopped thinking about the cases that I was working on. Yeah, but what was the time that would elapse? What's the time that would elapse from when you were given the case to when you when you were finished with your contribution was finished? I don't remember. I want to say a couple of months. Being a Supreme Court clerk is a job for a tortoise. You can't hurry. You have to work slowly and carefully because if you miss something that's a problem. I didn't even have to mention tortoises to Judge Sutton. He brought them up. You know, law is very much a tortoise. The tortoise went beats the hair, and so the hairs that go to the elite schools, they better slide into tortoise mode or it's not going to work out well for them. And the tortoises that go to the states schools better stay being a tortoise and stick with it. So let us recap. A sitting Supreme Court justice explains to a group of law school students that he will not consider them for a job that involves being a tortoise because they have failed to shine at a test that measures their ability to be a hare. And even as he says that, he concedes that one of the best of his former clerks was a tortoise who also did not shine at a test that measured his ability to be a hare. And when he presents this confounding bit of reasoning that manages both to stigmatize and disparage the entire audience, what does the audience do Listen? I mean, this is bananas. This is like prisoners cheering award. I think you can see why we are in need of a grand, unified theory to fix legal education. The Monday after my assistant, Camille, and I took the l SAD, we took the train to Newtown, Pennsylvania, to the headquarters of the Law School Admissions Council. This is the group that for the past seventy years has created and administered the l SAD. They operate out of a two story red brick building in an office park big atrium, very eighties. We were ushered into a conference room on the second floor where a row of test experts psychomatricians were waiting for us. What time you have to arrive at the test center. They began with a tutorial on how to make a standardized test, which I have to say was fascinating. It turns out a single item on a test like d ELSAT takes thirty six months to develop. They don't just dream up hard questions, They test the questions over and again to make sure that the right kind of heart. So what I've done here is I've identified a question that was actually rejected because it was not performing similarly for two subgroups of interest. Those were males and females. This is Alex Weissman. The question text is actually on the second page. It starts off Thomas Tompkins, a Renaissance English composer, wrote in a musical style that in his time had already become outdated, and so forth. This is a passage designed to test the reading comprehension skills of would be lawyers. But the results of the question came out weird. Women who were otherwise doing really well on that section were somehow tripping up on this particular question, and the equivalent group of male high scores were overwhelming they getting it right. So here we have almost two x male versus not well, almost twice as many males as women as females got this question correct. Right. So if that is already the indicative of a problem with this question, so why? The question of why is not always easy to answer and it and for a question like this, what we determine is even if we can't determine why this is happening, we don't take the chance in keeping it on the test. In this case, the l s AT wasn't functioning as a test of ability, which is what it's supposed to be. It seemed like it was a test of gender, which it's not supposed to be, so they threw the question out. When I talked to psychomatricians outside the legal world, they were unanimous in their praise of the l SAT. It was like talking to auto mechanics about a Porsche. Mechanics love Porsches, and if I had let them field, those three on the panel would have happily talked about their sports car for hours, the engine, the steering, the acceleration. But Chamille and I had just two days earlier taken the l SET, and what I really wanted to know was why would these guys building a sports car? I mean, why go so fast? Why don't just build a really good minivan. So we know in law school that doing the work efficiently, being able to handle the reading load and handle the amount of analysis that's required in a certain amount of time is relevant. Lily Nissovitch takes up the cause research requirements on any redesign of the test is to make sure that if you're changing the timing or the number of questions that you're asking the given amount of time, that you go back to square one and make sure it predicts we're now one hour and fourteen minutes into the presentation. I can't hold back any longer. So you've been talking about efficiency, but I was trying to be more You guys stopped me from being efficient. I had just been through the experience of finishing the first section of the l set with time to spare, and then running way out of time on the last logic section. The efficient way for me to take the test would be to speed up on the things that I was really good at and then use that time on the things I needed more time on. That's how efficient people were, right. But you wouldn't not me be efficient. I was told seventeen times you cannot look ahead at the next section. Why I stopped for ten minutes after the first one? Okay, so I'm getting a little bit worked up. But remember I'm under tremendous pressure to beat Camille on the l SAT and all this time she's sitting right next to me, all smug and complacent, like she was doing logic games in her head just for fun. I was like, why can't I look at the next one? I'm trying to be efficient. You're not letting me, I mean, because then you'd be giving getting more time for that next section. Than the first and next day, or the person who was the one, but the people who took the question when it was gone through all these levels of being efficient in law school is about time management, right, is about doing things you can do it really quickly quickly and using that extra time to if I'm a you know, a fast reader, but a slow writer, then it can you know, I have a different balance. And if I'm a fast writer and a slow reader, I don't get the sense that I'm making any headway. So my question is, why are you forcing us all to do every skill in thirty five minutes? If human beings are everyone in that room I took it with had a different set of skills, but you're why are you pushing us all into the same cookie cutter? And who else you travel? It's a standardized test, I guess standards timing is one of the features of the standardization. And we can do research on what you're saying, But have you well we've done research on the timing of the questions before they were ever introduced, how many how long it takes for people to do this number of questions reasonably well? To get your optimal score? Isn't necessarily to try every question, So some students to get a better score by spending more time per question and then leaving to skipping a few than by trying every question. Some students best strategy is to try every question, so we advise them to experiment on themselves when they're practicing and see what's there. That's the best strategy. But that's the only reason you need to have those strategies is because you had this arbitrary time constraint, Right, I just take a sup with the arbitrary. Am I being obnoxious? Maybe I am. It's like I've gone to push your headquarters in Stuttgart and I'm badgering them about why they aren't building something with sliding doors in third row seating it. I don't know. Doesn't it strike you that they should have at least thought about this a bit more? I mean, you you started by going through a really elegant description about how much care you take to make sure tests do not have some element of cultural or uh, you know, group unfairness, which I thought was super interesting. But now you just you. But you simultaneously have impose a system which which discriminates against someone who, for examples, a slow reader. You're You're, on the one hand, beautifully sensitive to the notion that the test might be disadvantaging a certain kind of person. But in this, in this, in the same breath, you are completely insensitive to the kind of person who wants to take their time that don't may be difficult. I'm just this is genuine. If this was my question test, you're so so by the information the test. Does we have to do it in the standardis way? Yeah, we're suggests is a different approach to these tests, and we couldn't, of course do that willie nilly. They'll tinker and rewrite and rethink and restructure the questions, but not the format. No, that's willy nilly. The thirty five minute time limits on each section are cast in stone. Why they cast in stone because the job of the l set is to make it easier for law schools to decide which students to admit. And what would have happened if I had been able to carry over my extra time or if that thirty five minutes was turned into forty five minutes, I would have scored higher, so would have lots of other tortoises. Give tortoises an extra ten minutes and suddenly some of them catch up to the hairs. But then, what has that done? Now it's harder for law schools to decide which students to admit. Back and I was preparing for the l SAT over the ed tech company Noodle. I asked their experts to game this out. One of the Noodle guys, Fritz Stewart, said, you could relieve the time pressure for a significant number of tortoises if you extended the l SAT to one hundred and twenty five percent of its current length. If we did win to one hundred and twenty five percent, So what's specifically we do it. What it's gonna do is it's it's gonna screw with their lovely normed Bell curve. Right, It's really subversive in a way. He's what Fritz is trying to do is destroy law school admissions in a good way. That's Dan Edmonds, another Noodle guy. What he means is this right now, over one hundred thousand people take the l SAT every year. The results fall on a Bell curve. Of course, the ninetieth percentile is right around one sixty four out of one hundred and eighty. The top schools are all mostly drawing from the pool above the one hundred and sixty seven mark. But if the test allows the tortoises to score higher, then suddenly the number we're one hundred and sixty seven would balloon, the bell curve goes to hell in a handbasket, and the law schools would have to make admissions about something other than just the l s AT score. Because currently the law school admissions is about seventy percent year all SAT score about thirty percent year grades, and that leaves pretty much zero percent for any other considerations. So if you take that pressure off, you're suddenly maybe tripling your number of qualified applicants for a lot of these top programs, and they're going to have to do the work of actually figuring out something other than a test to decide who gets into their school. Now that raises the question of why we don't just make the LL set harder, lift the time pressure, and compensate by making the questions much tougher so we get our nice, beautiful bell curve back. But now all we're doing is we're privileging the tortoises over the hairs. Now the Jeff Suttons of the world get a perfect score, go to Harvard Law School, and just as Scalia breathes a sigh of relief, except if you do it that way, the hairs get discouraged because they can only get into American University, where they're seventy seventh in the country. And when Supreme Court justices come to visit, they tell the students they have no chance. Why is this better? We need hairs too. If you're an investment bank trying to close an incredibly complicated deal in forty eight hours, where the lawyers have to all read a thousand pages in a day, maybe you want a hair. The law needs tortoises and hairs. We have now arrived at the absurdity of American meritocracy. Of course, the whole reason the people obsess over their else At score is that there are a small number of law schools that everyone wants to get into the top fourteen. The prestigious law firms basically only hire from the top fourteen, and the top fourteen only have room to admit forty five hundred students a year. In total, fifty three thousand people are competing for forty five hundred slots. It's crazy. I'm a graduate of the university of Toronto. All Canadians will tell you that the University of Toronto is their most prestigious, most elite, world class university. Do you know how many undergraduates attend the University of Toronto? Ready? Remember this is the elite school in a country of just thirty five million people. And just to orient yourself, Harvard University, the most elite school in a country of three hundred and thirty million people, has a total undergraduate enrollment of six thousand, six hundred and ninety nine. Ready, the best school in Canada has seventy thousand, eight hundred and ninety undergraduates. Now, how about the University of British Columbia, our second crown jewel fifty two thousand, seven hundred and eleven undergraduates. What about McGill University in Montreal? I always wished I went to McGill Intimate, elite, exclusive. McGill has twenty seven thousand, six hundred and one undergraduates. Do you see how genius this? We have elite schools in Canada, but we don't spend enormous amounts of time devising elaborate tests to arbitrarily limit the number of people who can attend those elite schools. We just made the schools bigger. Honestly, how hard is this? This whole revisionist history project on the ALSATT began when I ran across a paper on SSRN by a guy named William Henderson. We met him in the previous episode, the former firefighter from Cleveland who now teaches law at Indiana University. Well, Henderson told me to call a friend of his named Evan Parker. They worked together. I don't know if you've ever read Michael Lewis's famous book Moneyball, about the analytics nerds who took over baseball. They went in with their advanced statistics and told the old school scouts, you know you're picking the wrong players. Parker does moneyball for law firms. You mentioned money Ball earlier. It really is moneyball. Yeah, it is one hundred percent. Parker's young, cerebral very proper in a suit tie briefcase. He's not messing around. I said at the beginning that I was going to offer you a grand, unified theory of how to fix higher education. I'm almost there. Parker analyzes who the successful people are at any law firm, and then works backwards and asks is the firm hiring the kind of law school graduate who is most likely to become a good lawyer. He has multiple data points, regressions, algorithms, and he finds they don't hire the right kind of law school graduate. What is the inefficiency? That's it's the perfect word, is a market inefficiency. Firms have plenty of information about prospective hires, resume grades, law school work, experience, but Parker finds they don't how to make sense of it. People go for a shortcut instead. You end up selecting people who are like you, not people who are like the successful attorneys at your firm. You know, my colleague is called it the mirror autocracy, right, the mirror autocracy, people who remind us of ourselves at the standard law firm interview. A partner sits down with a second year law school student, and then that partner rates the candidate. What is the correlation between that rating and how well the candidate actually does when they get hired? Parker analyze the data. It was essentially a coin flip. So someone says, you know, you're this person's great or this person's serial. That really doesn't tell you anything about how they're actually going to do with retention, it was actually negative, so that those who are getting higher individual scores are actually less likely to stay. Parker's method is to try and systematize what a law firm wants so that when they interview someone, they know what to ask. I probably shouldn't say too much because I can't give it all the way. But what we can do is think of proxies for certain types of behavior. Right. So, blue collar worker experience, what happens if you have that in your background. I mean, that's a mixed bag. It could be a lot of things, right, But if you have that background and you've also gone on to succeed and graduate law school and perform well, that is to us a signal of something meaningful. Right. And so at certain firms you will see blue collar work experiences being one of the most I think positive and significant factors under the y'all lse equal conditions. What makes for a good lawyer is complicated. It differs from law firm to law firm, job to job, situation to situation. You need algorithms and data to make sense of it. And now we come to the heart of the issue. Some of the ones that are more I think surprising to firms are the things that don't matter. What doesn't matter, Wait for it all, where you went to law school. It doesn't matter at all, you know, at all. Yeah, it's it's essentially a random predictor. So is it not matter within T fourteen or does it not matter? Well, it really doesn't matter. If you go on the website of any hot shot law firm, they have a picture of every one of their attorneys, and next to the picture, they'll tell you where that person went to law school, so they can boast about how they never hire from Ohio State and American University. That's how much the profession is obsessed with law school pedigree. But what does the moneyball guy, the quant who has run the numbers tell us, really doesn't matter. You know, we like to sort of represent results visually, and so we'll have this baseline line and essentially, you know, what's to the left is sort of a negative predictor what's to the right as a positive. And you know, it's almost uniformly the case that this T fourteen falls right on that day, which is it's just an insignificant factor. Really, Yeah, that's kind of fantastic. Maybe fantastic is the wrong word infuriating is a better word. This whole process begins with the l set, which is based on the idea that a certain kind of thinking is valuable for legal education. And we know that's tricky because it's not exactly clear why that certain kind of thinking is so much more important than other kinds of thinking. But whatever, for a separate set of idiosyncratic reasons. America only has so many places at the top. So those who excel at that certain kind of thinking get into the top law schools, and those who get into the top law schools get hired by the top law firms. And then what do we find when you look at who succeeds at those top law firms, which hire in the basis of which law school you went to, which in turn select on the basis of whether you're good at that certain kind of thinking, you find where you went to law school doesn't matter. The whole daisy chain els at law school, law firm. We made it all up. Evan Parker once did a special study on rainmakers, the people who are really good at bringing in new business for a law firm. Law firms cannot survive without rainmakers, And I was struck in doing that work. How many of the individuals in our study in which to law schools that I've never even heard of? Right, or they went to night school to get their law degree night school and law schools you've never heard of. So what should we do about this absurdity? It is now time for Malcolm Gladwell's grand unified theory of how to fix higher education. Ready, don't ask, don't tell. We make a rule prospective employers cannot ask, and prospective employees cannot disclose the name of the educational institutions they attended. Can still go to Harvard if you want, spend a small fortune on tutoring for the l set so that when you sit down in that classroom you can be the very speediest hair you can be. For the minute you leave Harvard, you have to shut up about it. Silence. Harvard's over, and employers can't use it as a short cut for who to hire because it's not helping them, and they can't post it on their websites. While we're at it. By the way, let's don't ask, don't tell for all hiring. When you think about choosing a school, you should be thinking about where you can get the best education for you and where you will be happy. You shouldn't be making some complicated calculation about the brand value of your college in the workplace, and neither should the Supreme Court. So I can't afford a miss. I just can't. So I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. So this is what just Scalia could have said. He could have said in answer to Christina Stet's question. I care about people who can think deeply about consequential issues, who know how to read slowly, who are hungry enough to work on problems around the clock. I had a clerk once named Jeff Sutton who was all those things and more. And I guess what I'm looking for is another Jeff Sutton, another giant tortoise. And if you're concerned about the fact you go to Washington College of Law or Ohio State because your els AT score wasn't high enough, remember I don't care where you went to law school, because I consider it my responsibility, as a gatekeeper in a meritocracy to select people based on their fit and their ability, and not on their skill at answering twenty five questions in thirty five minutes something like that. It's not a hard thing to say, right. I'm here with Camille Baptista, my assistant with whom I went mano a mano on the l Sat. Three weeks ago, and Jacob Smith is also with us. This is the moment of unveiling we have. Camille was has gotten the email from the law school admissions council. Camilla, start with my score. Okay, okay, who oh, okay, nice? Okay, all right, all right, all right, okay, this is malcolm score. Wait what what? I can't believe it? No, go back to yours for a second. Were tied. We got the same score. And I know you want to know what the score is, but trust me, that way lies only bitterness and illusion. Don't ask, don't tell. That is all right, okay, the sweetest poetic justice. You know. We began this whole process back in January, and it was the whole question was whether my years of savvy and experience would be offset by my years of cognitive decline, and whether Camille, Camille, the swiftness and brightness and newness of her brain, would overcome her lack of of of real life experience. And turns out it's a wash. I think this outcome is absolutely beautiful and delightful. I think next season you guys should, as a stunt both go to law school in the name of science. Revisionist History is produced by mel La Belle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carl Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanik, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladbow. Okay, Malcolm. Your March twenty nineteen elsad score is the percentile rank is

Pushkin. April twenty fourth, two thousand and nine, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is speaking at American University's Washington College of Law. Thank you, thank you very much, Professor Marcus Dean Grossman, Ladies and gentlemen, I began one of one of my either talks. The students are all dressed up for the occasion. C Span is recording. There's a big stage hung with blue polyester drapes. Scalia holds forth, his black hair swept back from his forehead, glasses on his nose, strong and square, all intellectual heft and force, gripping the podium like it's a slab of beef. That administrative law is not for sissies. It is. It is a very difficult course to teach, and I assume certainly wasn't my day a hard course to master. It's vintage Scalia. The audience hangs on his every word. He finishes triumphantly, then hands shoot in the air. Good afternoon. My name is Christina, said, I'm a one else student here at WCL. Christina stud first year student. Have a more general question, and that is the part of American The American ethos is that our society is a meritocracy. Were hard work and talently to success, but there are other important factors like connections and elite degrees. And I'm wondering, other than grades a journal, what do smart, hardworking, wcale students with strong writing skills need to do to be outrageously successful in the law. What does it take to be outrageously successful in the law? Just work hard and be very good. I tell your story. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked I Misunderstood. This episode is part two of my examination of the bizarre things the legal profession does to pick its best and brightest. In part one, which if you haven't listened to you probably should, I took the law school admissions test along with my assistant Camille and couldn't understand why they made me rush through all the questions. But now in part two we have bigger fish to fry. I'm going to serve up Malcolm Gladwell's grand unified theory of how to fix American legal education. No, make that my grand unified theory for fixing all American higher education. And what is our text for this discussion of Gladwell's grand unified theory. It's the answer Justice Scalia gave to the unfortunate Christina stud you know, buy and large. Unless I have a professor on the faculty who's a good friend and preferably a former law clerk of mine whose judgment I can trust, I'm going to be picking, you know, for Supreme Court law clerks. I can't afford a miss I just can't. So I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically there are the hardest to get into. They admit the best in the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can't make you You can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse. And if they come in the best in the brightest, they're probably going to leave the best in the brightest. Okay, let's pretend to be fine legal minds for a moment and closely part the meaning and implication of Scaliah's statement. A student at American University's Washington College of Law, a law school that US News and Will Report ranked seventy seventh among all American law schools, is asking a question of a sitting justice of the US Supreme Court who graduated from Harvard Law School. She's basically asking him would it be possible to be one of his clerks, and he answers, you go to American Universiti's Washington College of Law, you have no chance of becoming one of my clerks. I only hired people who went to Harvard like I did. But then he goes on and he says this, which is my favorite part because it sums up absolutely everything I want to talk about in this episode. I mean everything now I started. The reason I tell the story is one of my former clerks who I am the most proud of it now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Jeff Sutton. I always referred him as one of my former law He wasn't one of my former law He was Lewis Powell's clerk at the time. Lewis Powell was semi retired from the Supreme Court. He had what's called senior status, so his law clerks worked mostly for other justices. But I wouldn't have hired Jeff Sutton for God's sake. He went to Ohio State and he's one of the very best law clerks I ever had. And he's just a brilliant guy. So don't tell me this stuff about you know, what do you have to do to be successful? You have to be good? Simple? Is that? Okay? I think we're done, Thank you very much. Oh we're not done. We've only just begun. Tell me why you decided to go to law school? WHOA So? Law school was a third choice. First choice was teaching. I was a teacher in coach for several years, both middle school, high school, soccer, baseball, little track. This is Judge Jeffrey Sutton, the guy who somehow slipped through the cracks to become the best clerk and n in Scalia ever. Had Foreign service was choice number two. No lawyers in my family, And when I finally went to law school, I wouldn't say my parents were beaming with pride. I came from a family of kind of service driven folks who were either in education some missionaries. And why did you decide to go to Ohio State Law school? Well, it was a pretty complicated decision. I applied to two law schools, Ohio State in Michigan. I got into one of them, and I ended up enrolling at the one I got into. Oh I see that I very much would have liked to have gone to Michigan, and I was the fact that my father in law had gone there and his son in law couldn't get in was a little humbling, but we got over it. I didn't ask Judge Sutton what his elsat's score was, but we can do the math. Michigan is part of the elite group of law schools known as the T fourteen, the top fourteen Yale, Stanford, Harvard, University of Chicago, Columbia, all the big ones. Ohio State is not among the T fourteen. The median elsat's score of someone who goes to Ohio State these days is eight points lower than the median score of someone at Michigan. Now what does that fact mean. Well, as you may recall from the previous episode, the ELSATT is not a test of someone's ability to solve difficult problems. It's a test of someone's ability to solve difficult problems quickly. It is five sections of twenty to twenty five questions, and you have a hard limit of thirty five minutes for each section you have to rush. As one ELSAT tutor told me, the test favors those capable of processing without understanding it favors heirs, not tortoises. So what's Jeff Sutton. Well, he's clearly brilliant. He was the Ohio State Solicitor in the nineteen nineties and wild the Supreme Court with his arguments on a number of cases. His most recent work of legal scholarship is titled fifty one Imperfect Solutions, States and the Making of Constitutional Law. The New York Review of Books felt they had to get a retired Supreme Court justice to review it. There are lots of very serious people, in fact, who think Sutton deserves to be a Supreme Court justice himself one day. So Sutton is in the category of brilliant person who didn't do all that well on the l side. What does that make him? It makes him a tortoise, and not just any tortoise, a giant tortoise. He's one of those tortoises from the Galapa Ghost that's five feet long. So Sutton graduates from Ohio State, gets a job clerking for a federal judge, then a job clerking on the Supreme Court, and in his year as clerk for Scalia, he thrives. The thing that really affects everybody who works with him is within weeks, you just get a sense of this incredible passion for the law, and that is just intoxicating. And that is what really changed things. And that year. I can't emphasize enough how much I got out of that year. Not long before, Jeffrey Sutton had been a middle school teacher and track coach in Columbus. Now he's working with one of the greatest legal minds in the country, and he does such a good job that seventeen years later, at some random speech at American University, Scalia singles him out. Scalia had well over a hundred clerks, jeff Sutton is the one he's proudest of. So why does a tortoise do so well working for the Supreme Court? I asked my fanciest legal friend, Tally for Hadien, who was a clerk on the Court a few years after Sutton for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, See, if you were working on a case, what is working on a case mean? Well, we worked on two kinds of cases. The first kind is what's called the sert pool, the thousands of petitions sent to Washington every year by people who want their cases heard by the Supreme Court. We would each get a stack of petitions I think on a Wednesday, and we had a week to get how would get into the pool? Yeah, so that in that case there will be a lot to read, a lot to read. When you read those kinds of things, How do you read? How do you read? I don't know what that question? Do you read the same way you read a work of nonfiction or a New Yorker article or well? I always read them, and I continue to read similar documents with a pencil in my hand, which is not how I would read for pleasure, whether nonfiction or fiction. Slower or faster? Much slower, much slower, yes, how much slower? Personally I feel I can read very quickly, and I can read very slowly, and I get different things out of it. But this is definitely slow reading territory. Is slow reading territory. And why is it so important to read slowly? Because the details matter and because the arguments are intricate, Yeah, and because the solutions are difficult. I mean, everybody will tell you this. When a case comes to the Supreme Court. You know a case that's really ready for a review with the Supreme Court, it's hard the reason the circuit courts have disagreed about it is because it's really hard, Like the answer is not obvious. Yeah, you're kidding yourself if you think that it is. So you have to you have to think while you read. Yeah. Yeah, you can't just process. You have to understand. Yes, yeah, you have to think while you read. This is the primary requirement of one of the most prestigious jobs in the legal profession. The other part of the job, the main part of the job, is researching and analyzing the actual cases that come before the court. For Hadian was one of four clerks working for O'Connor, so she would get assigned a quarter of those cases. And how much time would you spend on them? I don't think I ever stopped thinking about the cases that I was working on. Yeah, but what was the time that would elapse? What's the time that would elapse from when you were given the case to when you when you were finished with your contribution was finished? I don't remember. I want to say a couple of months. Being a Supreme Court clerk is a job for a tortoise. You can't hurry. You have to work slowly and carefully because if you miss something that's a problem. I didn't even have to mention tortoises to Judge Sutton. He brought them up. You know, law is very much a tortoise. The tortoise went beats the hair, and so the hairs that go to the elite schools, they better slide into tortoise mode or it's not going to work out well for them. And the tortoises that go to the states schools better stay being a tortoise and stick with it. So let us recap. A sitting Supreme Court justice explains to a group of law school students that he will not consider them for a job that involves being a tortoise because they have failed to shine at a test that measures their ability to be a hare. And even as he says that, he concedes that one of the best of his former clerks was a tortoise who also did not shine at a test that measured his ability to be a hare. And when he presents this confounding bit of reasoning that manages both to stigmatize and disparage the entire audience, what does the audience do Listen? I mean, this is bananas. This is like prisoners cheering award. I think you can see why we are in need of a grand, unified theory to fix legal education. The Monday after my assistant, Camille, and I took the l SAD, we took the train to Newtown, Pennsylvania, to the headquarters of the Law School Admissions Council. This is the group that for the past seventy years has created and administered the l SAD. They operate out of a two story red brick building in an office park big atrium, very eighties. We were ushered into a conference room on the second floor where a row of test experts psychomatricians were waiting for us. What time you have to arrive at the test center. They began with a tutorial on how to make a standardized test, which I have to say was fascinating. It turns out a single item on a test like d ELSAT takes thirty six months to develop. They don't just dream up hard questions, They test the questions over and again to make sure that the right kind of heart. So what I've done here is I've identified a question that was actually rejected because it was not performing similarly for two subgroups of interest. Those were males and females. This is Alex Weissman. The question text is actually on the second page. It starts off Thomas Tompkins, a Renaissance English composer, wrote in a musical style that in his time had already become outdated, and so forth. This is a passage designed to test the reading comprehension skills of would be lawyers. But the results of the question came out weird. Women who were otherwise doing really well on that section were somehow tripping up on this particular question, and the equivalent group of male high scores were overwhelming they getting it right. So here we have almost two x male versus not well, almost twice as many males as women as females got this question correct. Right. So if that is already the indicative of a problem with this question, so why? The question of why is not always easy to answer and it and for a question like this, what we determine is even if we can't determine why this is happening, we don't take the chance in keeping it on the test. In this case, the l s AT wasn't functioning as a test of ability, which is what it's supposed to be. It seemed like it was a test of gender, which it's not supposed to be, so they threw the question out. When I talked to psychomatricians outside the legal world, they were unanimous in their praise of the l SAT. It was like talking to auto mechanics about a Porsche. Mechanics love Porsches, and if I had let them field, those three on the panel would have happily talked about their sports car for hours, the engine, the steering, the acceleration. But Chamille and I had just two days earlier taken the l SET, and what I really wanted to know was why would these guys building a sports car? I mean, why go so fast? Why don't just build a really good minivan. So we know in law school that doing the work efficiently, being able to handle the reading load and handle the amount of analysis that's required in a certain amount of time is relevant. Lily Nissovitch takes up the cause research requirements on any redesign of the test is to make sure that if you're changing the timing or the number of questions that you're asking the given amount of time, that you go back to square one and make sure it predicts we're now one hour and fourteen minutes into the presentation. I can't hold back any longer. So you've been talking about efficiency, but I was trying to be more You guys stopped me from being efficient. I had just been through the experience of finishing the first section of the l set with time to spare, and then running way out of time on the last logic section. The efficient way for me to take the test would be to speed up on the things that I was really good at and then use that time on the things I needed more time on. That's how efficient people were, right. But you wouldn't not me be efficient. I was told seventeen times you cannot look ahead at the next section. Why I stopped for ten minutes after the first one? Okay, so I'm getting a little bit worked up. But remember I'm under tremendous pressure to beat Camille on the l SAT and all this time she's sitting right next to me, all smug and complacent, like she was doing logic games in her head just for fun. I was like, why can't I look at the next one? I'm trying to be efficient. You're not letting me, I mean, because then you'd be giving getting more time for that next section. Than the first and next day, or the person who was the one, but the people who took the question when it was gone through all these levels of being efficient in law school is about time management, right, is about doing things you can do it really quickly quickly and using that extra time to if I'm a you know, a fast reader, but a slow writer, then it can you know, I have a different balance. And if I'm a fast writer and a slow reader, I don't get the sense that I'm making any headway. So my question is, why are you forcing us all to do every skill in thirty five minutes? If human beings are everyone in that room I took it with had a different set of skills, but you're why are you pushing us all into the same cookie cutter? And who else you travel? It's a standardized test, I guess standards timing is one of the features of the standardization. And we can do research on what you're saying, But have you well we've done research on the timing of the questions before they were ever introduced, how many how long it takes for people to do this number of questions reasonably well? To get your optimal score? Isn't necessarily to try every question, So some students to get a better score by spending more time per question and then leaving to skipping a few than by trying every question. Some students best strategy is to try every question, so we advise them to experiment on themselves when they're practicing and see what's there. That's the best strategy. But that's the only reason you need to have those strategies is because you had this arbitrary time constraint, Right, I just take a sup with the arbitrary. Am I being obnoxious? Maybe I am. It's like I've gone to push your headquarters in Stuttgart and I'm badgering them about why they aren't building something with sliding doors in third row seating it. I don't know. Doesn't it strike you that they should have at least thought about this a bit more? I mean, you you started by going through a really elegant description about how much care you take to make sure tests do not have some element of cultural or uh, you know, group unfairness, which I thought was super interesting. But now you just you. But you simultaneously have impose a system which which discriminates against someone who, for examples, a slow reader. You're You're, on the one hand, beautifully sensitive to the notion that the test might be disadvantaging a certain kind of person. But in this, in this, in the same breath, you are completely insensitive to the kind of person who wants to take their time that don't may be difficult. I'm just this is genuine. If this was my question test, you're so so by the information the test. Does we have to do it in the standardis way? Yeah, we're suggests is a different approach to these tests, and we couldn't, of course do that willie nilly. They'll tinker and rewrite and rethink and restructure the questions, but not the format. No, that's willy nilly. The thirty five minute time limits on each section are cast in stone. Why they cast in stone because the job of the l set is to make it easier for law schools to decide which students to admit. And what would have happened if I had been able to carry over my extra time or if that thirty five minutes was turned into forty five minutes, I would have scored higher, so would have lots of other tortoises. Give tortoises an extra ten minutes and suddenly some of them catch up to the hairs. But then, what has that done? Now it's harder for law schools to decide which students to admit. Back and I was preparing for the l SAT over the ed tech company Noodle. I asked their experts to game this out. One of the Noodle guys, Fritz Stewart, said, you could relieve the time pressure for a significant number of tortoises if you extended the l SAT to one hundred and twenty five percent of its current length. If we did win to one hundred and twenty five percent, So what's specifically we do it. What it's gonna do is it's it's gonna screw with their lovely normed Bell curve. Right, It's really subversive in a way. He's what Fritz is trying to do is destroy law school admissions in a good way. That's Dan Edmonds, another Noodle guy. What he means is this right now, over one hundred thousand people take the l SAT every year. The results fall on a Bell curve. Of course, the ninetieth percentile is right around one sixty four out of one hundred and eighty. The top schools are all mostly drawing from the pool above the one hundred and sixty seven mark. But if the test allows the tortoises to score higher, then suddenly the number we're one hundred and sixty seven would balloon, the bell curve goes to hell in a handbasket, and the law schools would have to make admissions about something other than just the l s AT score. Because currently the law school admissions is about seventy percent year all SAT score about thirty percent year grades, and that leaves pretty much zero percent for any other considerations. So if you take that pressure off, you're suddenly maybe tripling your number of qualified applicants for a lot of these top programs, and they're going to have to do the work of actually figuring out something other than a test to decide who gets into their school. Now that raises the question of why we don't just make the LL set harder, lift the time pressure, and compensate by making the questions much tougher so we get our nice, beautiful bell curve back. But now all we're doing is we're privileging the tortoises over the hairs. Now the Jeff Suttons of the world get a perfect score, go to Harvard Law School, and just as Scalia breathes a sigh of relief, except if you do it that way, the hairs get discouraged because they can only get into American University, where they're seventy seventh in the country. And when Supreme Court justices come to visit, they tell the students they have no chance. Why is this better? We need hairs too. If you're an investment bank trying to close an incredibly complicated deal in forty eight hours, where the lawyers have to all read a thousand pages in a day, maybe you want a hair. The law needs tortoises and hairs. We have now arrived at the absurdity of American meritocracy. Of course, the whole reason the people obsess over their else At score is that there are a small number of law schools that everyone wants to get into the top fourteen. The prestigious law firms basically only hire from the top fourteen, and the top fourteen only have room to admit forty five hundred students a year. In total, fifty three thousand people are competing for forty five hundred slots. It's crazy. I'm a graduate of the university of Toronto. All Canadians will tell you that the University of Toronto is their most prestigious, most elite, world class university. Do you know how many undergraduates attend the University of Toronto? Ready? Remember this is the elite school in a country of just thirty five million people. And just to orient yourself, Harvard University, the most elite school in a country of three hundred and thirty million people, has a total undergraduate enrollment of six thousand, six hundred and ninety nine. Ready, the best school in Canada has seventy thousand, eight hundred and ninety undergraduates. Now, how about the University of British Columbia, our second crown jewel fifty two thousand, seven hundred and eleven undergraduates. What about McGill University in Montreal? I always wished I went to McGill Intimate, elite, exclusive. McGill has twenty seven thousand, six hundred and one undergraduates. Do you see how genius this? We have elite schools in Canada, but we don't spend enormous amounts of time devising elaborate tests to arbitrarily limit the number of people who can attend those elite schools. We just made the schools bigger. Honestly, how hard is this? This whole revisionist history project on the ALSATT began when I ran across a paper on SSRN by a guy named William Henderson. We met him in the previous episode, the former firefighter from Cleveland who now teaches law at Indiana University. Well, Henderson told me to call a friend of his named Evan Parker. They worked together. I don't know if you've ever read Michael Lewis's famous book Moneyball, about the analytics nerds who took over baseball. They went in with their advanced statistics and told the old school scouts, you know you're picking the wrong players. Parker does moneyball for law firms. You mentioned money Ball earlier. It really is moneyball. Yeah, it is one hundred percent. Parker's young, cerebral very proper in a suit tie briefcase. He's not messing around. I said at the beginning that I was going to offer you a grand, unified theory of how to fix higher education. I'm almost there. Parker analyzes who the successful people are at any law firm, and then works backwards and asks is the firm hiring the kind of law school graduate who is most likely to become a good lawyer. He has multiple data points, regressions, algorithms, and he finds they don't hire the right kind of law school graduate. What is the inefficiency? That's it's the perfect word, is a market inefficiency. Firms have plenty of information about prospective hires, resume grades, law school work, experience, but Parker finds they don't how to make sense of it. People go for a shortcut instead. You end up selecting people who are like you, not people who are like the successful attorneys at your firm. You know, my colleague is called it the mirror autocracy, right, the mirror autocracy, people who remind us of ourselves at the standard law firm interview. A partner sits down with a second year law school student, and then that partner rates the candidate. What is the correlation between that rating and how well the candidate actually does when they get hired? Parker analyze the data. It was essentially a coin flip. So someone says, you know, you're this person's great or this person's serial. That really doesn't tell you anything about how they're actually going to do with retention, it was actually negative, so that those who are getting higher individual scores are actually less likely to stay. Parker's method is to try and systematize what a law firm wants so that when they interview someone, they know what to ask. I probably shouldn't say too much because I can't give it all the way. But what we can do is think of proxies for certain types of behavior. Right. So, blue collar worker experience, what happens if you have that in your background. I mean, that's a mixed bag. It could be a lot of things, right, But if you have that background and you've also gone on to succeed and graduate law school and perform well, that is to us a signal of something meaningful. Right. And so at certain firms you will see blue collar work experiences being one of the most I think positive and significant factors under the y'all lse equal conditions. What makes for a good lawyer is complicated. It differs from law firm to law firm, job to job, situation to situation. You need algorithms and data to make sense of it. And now we come to the heart of the issue. Some of the ones that are more I think surprising to firms are the things that don't matter. What doesn't matter, Wait for it all, where you went to law school. It doesn't matter at all, you know, at all. Yeah, it's it's essentially a random predictor. So is it not matter within T fourteen or does it not matter? Well, it really doesn't matter. If you go on the website of any hot shot law firm, they have a picture of every one of their attorneys, and next to the picture, they'll tell you where that person went to law school, so they can boast about how they never hire from Ohio State and American University. That's how much the profession is obsessed with law school pedigree. But what does the moneyball guy, the quant who has run the numbers tell us, really doesn't matter. You know, we like to sort of represent results visually, and so we'll have this baseline line and essentially, you know, what's to the left is sort of a negative predictor what's to the right as a positive. And you know, it's almost uniformly the case that this T fourteen falls right on that day, which is it's just an insignificant factor. Really, Yeah, that's kind of fantastic. Maybe fantastic is the wrong word infuriating is a better word. This whole process begins with the l set, which is based on the idea that a certain kind of thinking is valuable for legal education. And we know that's tricky because it's not exactly clear why that certain kind of thinking is so much more important than other kinds of thinking. But whatever, for a separate set of idiosyncratic reasons. America only has so many places at the top. So those who excel at that certain kind of thinking get into the top law schools, and those who get into the top law schools get hired by the top law firms. And then what do we find when you look at who succeeds at those top law firms, which hire in the basis of which law school you went to, which in turn select on the basis of whether you're good at that certain kind of thinking, you find where you went to law school doesn't matter. The whole daisy chain els at law school, law firm. We made it all up. Evan Parker once did a special study on rainmakers, the people who are really good at bringing in new business for a law firm. Law firms cannot survive without rainmakers, And I was struck in doing that work. How many of the individuals in our study in which to law schools that I've never even heard of? Right, or they went to night school to get their law degree night school and law schools you've never heard of. So what should we do about this absurdity? It is now time for Malcolm Gladwell's grand unified theory of how to fix higher education. Ready, don't ask, don't tell. We make a rule prospective employers cannot ask, and prospective employees cannot disclose the name of the educational institutions they attended. Can still go to Harvard if you want, spend a small fortune on tutoring for the l set so that when you sit down in that classroom you can be the very speediest hair you can be. For the minute you leave Harvard, you have to shut up about it. Silence. Harvard's over, and employers can't use it as a short cut for who to hire because it's not helping them, and they can't post it on their websites. While we're at it. By the way, let's don't ask, don't tell for all hiring. When you think about choosing a school, you should be thinking about where you can get the best education for you and where you will be happy. You shouldn't be making some complicated calculation about the brand value of your college in the workplace, and neither should the Supreme Court. So I can't afford a miss. I just can't. So I'm going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. So this is what just Scalia could have said. He could have said in answer to Christina Stet's question. I care about people who can think deeply about consequential issues, who know how to read slowly, who are hungry enough to work on problems around the clock. I had a clerk once named Jeff Sutton who was all those things and more. And I guess what I'm looking for is another Jeff Sutton, another giant tortoise. And if you're concerned about the fact you go to Washington College of Law or Ohio State because your els AT score wasn't high enough, remember I don't care where you went to law school, because I consider it my responsibility, as a gatekeeper in a meritocracy to select people based on their fit and their ability, and not on their skill at answering twenty five questions in thirty five minutes something like that. It's not a hard thing to say, right. I'm here with Camille Baptista, my assistant with whom I went mano a mano on the l Sat. Three weeks ago, and Jacob Smith is also with us. This is the moment of unveiling we have. Camille was has gotten the email from the law school admissions council. Camilla, start with my score. Okay, okay, who oh, okay, nice? Okay, all right, all right, all right, okay, this is malcolm score. Wait what what? I can't believe it? No, go back to yours for a second. Were tied. We got the same score. And I know you want to know what the score is, but trust me, that way lies only bitterness and illusion. Don't ask, don't tell. That is all right, okay, the sweetest poetic justice. You know. We began this whole process back in January, and it was the whole question was whether my years of savvy and experience would be offset by my years of cognitive decline, and whether Camille, Camille, the swiftness and brightness and newness of her brain, would overcome her lack of of of real life experience. And turns out it's a wash. I think this outcome is absolutely beautiful and delightful. I think next season you guys should, as a stunt both go to law school in the name of science. Revisionist History is produced by mel La Belle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carl Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanik, and Jacob Weisberg. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladbow. Okay, Malcolm. Your March twenty nineteen elsad score is the percentile rank is