As one of the most selective law schools in the country, Harvard Law School searches for truly remarkable students to fill its halls.
The country's second-oldest law school accepts just 11 percent of its applicants, but an incredible 92 percent of its grads are employed soon after they graduate.
Countless Supreme Court justices, federal judges, politicians, and business leaders have degrees from Harvard Law.
But what makes the school so celebrated is the quality of its students.
It takes more than just high grades and impressive extracurricular activities to get into this elite school. To stand out among such a distinguished group, students need groundbreaking achievements and unique stories.
Here are the 21 most impressive students at Harvard Law School right now.
Angela Antony founded her own environmental tech startup before law school.
Age: 26
Year: 1L
Hometown: Cary, N.C.
Undergrad: Harvard
When Angela Antony was a senior at Harvard College, she co-founded Beanstockd Media, an environmental media and software company that encouraged green living through an interactive game.
Players could compete against each other in a virtual stock market, where each player received personal stock based on their environmental footprint. Because of Beanstockd, Antony won the MTV Young Creators’ Award and the Knight Foundation News Challenge and was featured in U.S. News and World Report, Businessweek, Young Money Magazine, and PBS.
During her undergrad years at Harvard, she co-founded the Harvard Presidents Forum, an association of all the Harvard student associations, and was on the executive board of the Leadership Institute at Harvard College.
After that, she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in psychology and finished her MBA at Harvard Business in 2012. At Harvard Law, she is the school’s delegate for the university-wide Graduate Council and a senior editor at the Business Law Review.
And she has hobbies outside of business and law: she’s a classically trained soprano, was on the Harvard JV soccer and sailing teams, and speaks four languages (French, Spanish, Malayalam, and English).
Lily Axelrod is a community organizer who strives to make life easier for new immigrants.
Age: 25
Year: 1L
Hometown: Ann Arbor, Mich.
Undergrad: Brown University
Lily Axelrod's grandmother fled the pogroms in Poland at age 7 and arrived in a Chicago public school, Yiddish-speaking and near-sighted without glasses.
Her family's immigrant struggle inspired her to become a community organizer at an immigrants' rights nonprofit organization in Mississippi before starting at HLS. She helped immigrant families navigate social services, the immigration detention system, and voter registration. She also did paralegal work at an immigration law firm in Memphis, Tenn., where she translated for Spanish-speaking clients and prepared visa applications.
While studying abroad in Mexico, she served as a human rights observer and lived with Zapatista families who were threatened with forced displacement from their homes.
At Harvard, she participates in the Harvard Immigration Project's Community Training Team. She volunteers at a Boston legal clinic, helping young people whose parents brought them to the country illegally gain work permits and driver's licenses.
She also edits the Harvard Latino Review and serves on the board of Harvard Law Students for Reproductive Justice.
After graduating, she hopes to continue working with immigrants in the U.S. and to remain involved with community organizing and policy advocacy.
Lara Berlin is working to end human rights abuses around the world.
Age: 27
Hometown: San Diego, Calif.
Year: Third year of a four-year joint degree program with HLS and the Fletcher School at Tufts University (pursuing a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy).
Undergrad: Yale University
While studying development and human health in Kenya, Lara Berlin discovered her passion for human rights.
During her junior year at Yale, she traveled to Kenya through a study abroad program called the School for International Training. She enjoyed it so much that she went to Sierra Leone after graduation and studied conflict resolution and the barriers facing female candidates in local elections with the Search for Common Ground.
Last spring, she worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she wrote primers on conflict resolution. She also spent last summer researching the impact of covert drone operations on civilians at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Civilians in Conflict.
As a student attorney, Berlin has mediated small claims cases in the Harvard Mediation Program and learned the basics of conflict negotiation with the Harvard Negotiators. And she has continued her human rights work through the Harvard International Human Rights Clinic, where she created a project to address the challenges facing Syrian refugees.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Please follow Law & Order on Twitter and Facebook.
