I never fully understood why students would go to a bottom tier law school and take out 200K in loans, when you very well know the value of a bottom tier law school. I mean, today is not the lack of information age. You can pretty much find out all the data points needed about a school. For instance, bottom tier schools typically don't advertise the graduating salaries or employment data. Just this one data point is an indicator of future earnings potential.

That being said, top law schools or top schools for that matter are within reach for low income individuals as long as they clear the entry criteria.This entry criteria is a whole another debate but Lambda and other schools also have an entry criteria.

There are need based scholarships and I think Stanford/MIT/Berkeley offer free tuition if your parents earn less than 100K per annum or something like that. So opportunity is definitely there but then not everyone can make it to Stanford, yes but that doesn't mean you saddle yourself with a huge debt by going to a lower tier school, knowing that your loan repayment capacity will be very low in the initial years of post graduation employment.