Legal Geekery has posted a great chart setting out the standards used by 68 schools in assessing whether to give students the honors cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. Assuming the info is accurate (and it is incomplete), it's interesting to note the following schools grant cum laude honors to folks who don't even make it into the top 25%: Harvard, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, Georgetown, Wash U., Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, Hastings, Maryland, Cincinnati, and UConn. (Based on the comments, it looks like Harvard awards cum laude to anyone in the top 40%.)
Stingy schools? San Diego and Penn State offer cum laude only to the top 10%; Cardozo only goes to the top 15%. (Many schools use nominal GPA's – which does not provide us much information.)
Duke and Alabama are the most generous with magna: the top 15% of the class gets it.
H/T: Paul Caron
Some schools like Yale and Virginia don't use any cum laude designations.
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