USNews spells out the difference between schools so much that the results appear hasty and overconfident, U Indiana-Bloomington’s interactive ranking leaves far too much to the imagination to get a meaningful result. I put together a simple excel spreadsheet weighting the various attributes of the schools and putting together a cumulative score. Now, if I were an informed professor, I might have been able to put together a better spreadsheet (hint hint!).

–Jack Payne

http://www.sixhrs.com

There’s a pretty good correlation between what a student’s job prospects at a school will be and what the reputation survey for a law school in the ranking indicates. When it comes to job prospects, I would argue that law school is much more hierarchical than undergrad and that this was the case before US News came up with this. There’s a lot that is annoying, but something along these lines was needed for an undergrad with a limited connection to practicing lawyers to distinguish between all 180 schools. (i.e., it’s easy to take it for granted that everybody applying will realize a school like Michigan and Virginia will give them great job prospects and just how large a difference there will be between those and other schools–but depending on your connections, whether you knew anybody practicing law, your school, the region of the country you’re going to college in, I think there was a time when it was easier to overlook that and without US News it would be easier for a 20 year old college student to overlook this sort of thing again.)

Very interesting question. You’re right; “we” (as academics collectively) have control over the peer assessment scores. I don’t think, though, “we” have much control over what individual faculty will do. People in our business love the idea of being asked for their opinions. That’s what leads me to think that law schools won’t be able to shut off the peer assessment scores. You’d have to stop hundreds of people (at least I hope and expect that US News’ peer assessment is based on hundreds, not only a few dozen people).

Even if somehow “we” could stop ourselves from filing out those forms, I think there are some pretty good proxies that US News might turn to. (Apologies for up-coming product placement.) This paper, for instance, discusses the close correlation between citations to a law school’s main review and its peer assessment score. So I think US News might turn to some other measure like that, even if we were able to convince law profs to stop filing out the US News questionaires. (That measure wouldn’t have the mystery associated with the peer assessment scores and I also think that it’s increasingly problematic as schools are focusing more attention on their law reviews.)

“Where true information is obtained illegally– whether by trespass, fraud, or breach of confidence or contract–the presumption should shift sharply in the other direction, so that both damages and injunctive relief are made available to the party with the right to keep that information confidential.”

from 52 Stan. L. Rev. 1003 (2000).

I don’t think that would work, but this example gives me a bit more sympathy with Epstein’s position.

I don’t think the end is near for US News’ law school ratings for a different set of reasons (having little to do with what law schools think about them). US News’ law school ratings are based largely based on data schools submit to the ABA and so I think it would be hard for schools to opt out of providing data to US News. That is, US News can get the information it needs several different ways. The peer and lawyer/judge assessment scores are, of course, the creation of US News and so it’s virtually impossible for law schools to shut off that source of information.