A New Way to Rank Law Schools. As programs withdraw from established ranking systems, it’s worth considering what might replace them.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | January 13, 2023 | Matthew G. Andersson

[karpov]

In late 2023, a new book on law and legal education is coming out (Legally Blind). In the book, I explain how ideology is affecting legal theory, teaching, and the larger law industry, including its entrenched ways of doing business. This all starts with the law schools, and fixing the problem will involve reconsidering how such institutions are categorized and ranked.

At present, law-school rankings function mostly as sales and branding mechanisms rather than providing an actual managerial report that reflects institutional performance. They speak very little, if at all, to the way a school is run operationally and its specific strategic plans.

Moreover, law-school rankings are backward looking: The reviewers and organizers of the surveys are mostly media staff, and their objective is to market and sell the rankings report, as well as to generate advertising spending, newsstand sales, subscriptions, cross-selling, and “hits” for digital data purposes. They flatter a handful of schools, while the rest languish year after year for no apparent reason.

The magazines and media companies that run the annual rankings are not able or qualified to tell you very much about the content of each of the law-school programs they examine. (There isn’t much they can tell you about standard law courses, which merely conform to Bar requirements.) Instead, the rankings honor university endowments, investment and donor activity, and the depth and magnitude of corporate and governmental cross-interests. (Harvard, Texas, and Yale are effective hedge funds, with over $30 billion each in investable assets.)

In an interesting coincidence, the Yale Law School, generally ranked for decades as “#1,” recently decided to pull out of the U.S. News & World Report law-school ranking program. (It actually can’t “withdraw,” but that’s another matter.) Suddenly, the entire rankings status quo seems suspect. Perhaps it is.

[Dr. Sivana]

The big mistake in law school education for some time now has been the extreme over-emphasis on case study (the case book method), with too little on the actual mechanics of law.

John Marshall Law School had been a rare exception to this, using practicing attorneys instead of teacher-only types. They too have now abandoned that and are also dropping the “offensive” name of John Marshall.

[rktman]

Only one entity finishes first in class.

[Paladin2]

No more Martial Law?

[Yo-Yo]

John Marshall Law School had been a rare exception to this, using practicing attorneys instead of teacher-only types

No more Professor Kingsfields passing out dimes?

[Chickensoup]

Nice.

He quantifies something that we have known for a long time. Legal education stinks.

Up to this year harvard was quite out there describing that only a third of their law review staff were competing the rest were chosen for non intellectual reasons.

[ptsal]

Bkmk

[FLT-bird]

Rank them on their bar passage rate, the rate of employment at graduation, 6 months and 1 year after graduation, and average starting salary at purchasing power parity....ie no you should not get an artificial boost making it look like your grads earn more because you’re located in an expensive place and most of your grads will take jobs there. Adjusted for cost of living, a lot of people in places like NYC are poorer instead of being richer than people who live in much lower cost regions.