Ted Cruz's Ultra-Exclusive HLS Study Group

As any seasoned Law School student knows, the key to surviving the Socratic method and the mountains of reading assigned weekly is a study group in which you can bounce ideas off of some of your peers who were also brilliant enough to get into Harvard Law.

But when Senator Ted Cruz—a 1995 Harvard Law School graduate and Republican from Texas—was a student at HLS, his own study groups had an admissions standard almost as inflated as his own ego. According to one of his colleagues, the now-infamous senator refused to study with any student who did not attend college at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. "He said he didn't want anybody from 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown," Damon Watson, one of Cruz's roommates at the time, recently told GQ.

Yet Cruz did make at least one exception to his HYP-exclusive club, and not even for a "minor Ivy" but a graduate of Northwestern.

Cruz made headlines at Harvard Law School earlier this year when he called out the faculty here for having a starkly communist streak.

Before wannabe-senators begin checking diplomas before allowing students into their study groups, let's not forget that the 15.6 percent of applicants admitted to the Harvard Law School Class of 2016 have a 3.88 average GPA and a 173 average on their LSATs, representing 171 undergraduate institutions. The takeaway? They are probably all smart and worthy study companions. And do you really want to be a senator that GQ calls a "wacko bird" anyways?