Sorry to bother the rest of the world with an answer to a question put by Carm and apologies to you, Carm, for making my answer public, but I am not being able to send private messages. The "send message"-stupid-button is not working!! Anyhow, this might be helpful to other people.

Hi Carm. Where are you from? There are several South Americans here and they are all great!

I think that Harvard is an awesome place. The faculty body is very diverse and high-standard, most students are clever and the institutional resources are striking. But it is a rather huge place and sometimes you feel a Kafkian distance from a more personalized world. I mean, people here, especially the graduate program staff, try to eliminate that feeling, but it is inevitable.

The top LLM programs are known. I would say that there are two triads: the very best - Yale, Harvard, and Stanford - and the next best - NYU, Chicago, and Columbia. You will most certainly get into one of these, probably more than one. My feeling is that you should rank the very best above the others (even if "living in NY" sounds cool...).

Which one should you rank as your first choice? It depends on your tastes and goals. Yale has a purely academic-oriented program very strong if you enjoy mainstream liberal legal scholarship; Harvard has a somehow mixed program, very strong both in corporate (and IP!) and non-mainstream legal scholarship (like CLS); Stanford is the one I know the least about, but I believe it is mainly focused on people with settled professional objectives and a strong career background outside the academia. This should make your choice easier. In terms of rankings, which are far from everything, Yale is the very best. It is also probably the most difficult to get into.

As for the application, do everything "by the book" - outstanding statement, LSAC-recognized transcripts, best recommendations you can get, etc. - and try to differentiate yourself from other "by the book" candidates in some "sexy" details. You must look both standard in terms of your credentials - i.e. they must be awesome - and "sexy" in terms of your character.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Here's my reply as well, for what it's worth:

1) LLM Program: I think it's incredible. Forget the people who claim Harvard is overrated. My interests are Constitutional Law and Securities Law, focusing on the latter.

For Constitutional Law, I am studying under Lawrence Tribe now, and it doesn't get better than that. We have guest lectures (for the law school) from the likes of the Chief Justice of Israel to Bruce Ackerman from Yale.

For Securities Law, my International Finance professor Hal Scott wrote the authoritative text on it dated 2005. For Corporate Governance, I have Lucian Bebchuk who is the authority in that field as well, and every law firm corporate partner I've talked to knows who he is. For Mergers and Acquisitions, I have John Coates, a former partner of Wachtell Lipton, the most prestigious law firm in the country at present and the one that did all the takeover work in the 80's. The other M&A class is done by the former dean and co-taught by Vice-Chancellor Leo Strine of the Delaware court that decides all the corporate law cases.

As for guest speakers, yesterday, we had the CEO of Time Warner, an executive of the hedge fund making noise about that company now, plus the relevant department head of Goldman Sachs. Today, we had a cabinet minister from Japan, speaking only to a class of about twelve students.

Every law firm comes down here to recruit as well, and some students (from all continents) have received invitations to fly to New York in roughly the first six weeks of class.

2) Advice for you: I come from an English speaking country so have no gauge for TOEFL. I believe I got in on the strength of good recommendation letters and striking legal writing credentials, since I had numerous legal writing awards from my law school and was head of my country's leading law journal. I was also research assistant for my law dean and assisted him with Constitutional litigaiton and appearances in the Supreme Court.

My advice, aside from carefully crafting your resume and getting good recommendations, is to make sure your essay stands out and has great personality. I think they aren't interested purely in academic credentials, so you know the drill.

3) Why HLS: If you want a job, I've already told you all the law firms come here to hire. Otherwise, all the resources are here, and Harvard can pull everything from CEOs to library books and make things happen. Finally, I enjoy the large class size as I take the effort to meet people and make that work to my advantage.

You should do your homework, but I know I am working under the leaders in the fields I'm interested in. If you take the effort to get to know them, they will give you quality time.

That's about all I can say given the general questions. Hope it helped.