Archive for the ‘Law School (Rankings)’ Category

Choosing a law school, part 5

posted by Alfred Yen

I thought I would say a bit about faculty – the people who teach all those classes in the curriculum. Every law school will tell you that its faculty is excellent, and with justification. Law teaching jobs are sufficiently desirable that law schools generally have many, many qualified applicants for openings. Law schools today hire very well qualified people. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest one way in which prospective students can evaluate whether a particular faculty will provide a good educational experience.

Professors come in many types. For purposes of this post, however, we can get along with a distinction between permanent faculty and part-time (frequently called adjuncts) faculty. For permanent faculty, law teaching is their full-time job. Part-time faculty, as their name implies, generally have another job and devote a relatively small amount of their time to law teaching. They generally teach one class at a school, often in the early morning or evening, and they frequently do so from year to year.

A good school should have the vast majority of its courses, particularly first year courses and basic doctrinal upper year courses, taught by permanent faculty. This is not to say that part-time faculty can’t do a good job. Many are good, dedicated teachers. Nevertheless, full-time faculty are at the school, present for students in ways that would be impossible for part-time faculty. Those professors have more time to focus on teaching, and they bring cutting edge expertise based on their research to the classroom. There are, of course, areas in which part-time faculty can do a better job than permanent faculty. For example, skills courses or courses focused on specialized topics related to practice (e.g. business planning) benefit from the day to day practical experience of adjuncts.

Accreditors give significant importance to the principle that law students should be taught primarily by full-time faculty, and accreditors will give law schools trouble if the principle is violated. Surprisingly, however, law schools sometimes overuse part-time faculty. This happens because, at some schools, permanent faculty do not want to teach first year or other basic courses. Student enrollments in those classes are high, so teaching those classes takes more time than teaching smaller seminars that may be more closely related to a faculty member’s research. It’s obviously hard for schools to force tenured professors to teach classes they don’t want to teach. Indeed, faculty who don’t want to teach a class may not do a good job.

For prospective students, a law school that does not put its full-time faculty in basic classes raises a question that needs to be answered. Do the school and its faculty really give sufficient priority to teaching students? Every school will of course answer yes, but sometimes actions speak louder than words.

  March 19, 2010 at 2:57 pm  Tags: academia, Law School  Posted in: Law School (Rankings), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Thoughts about choosing law school, part 4

posted by Alfred Yen

Law schools compete for students by touting the strength of their curriculum, and with every school claiming that it is strong in a particular area, it’s sometimes hard to get a handle on whether a particular school really would be better than another for a student interested in, for example, corporate law or environmental law. One possible way to assess this might be the raw number of courses in a particular area, and in a sense more can be preferred to less. That having been said, I’d encourage prospective students to look beyond raw numbers when evaluating claims of curricular excellence.

A school that offers, for example, 24 intellectual property courses surely offers far more courses than an individual student could ever take. That doesn’t mean that the large number of offerings is valueless. Rather, a student should think carefully about how many courses one can profitably devote to concentration in a particular area versus the general education that forms the foundation for the successful practice of law. For example, a student may want to specialize in intellectual property, but she should also make room in her curriculum for corporations, commercial law, antitrust, employment law, and other areas that arise when considering IP issues. Additionally, I think it’s important for students to take a class or two devoted to perspectives on law like jurisprudence, law and economics, or legal history. They greatly enrich a legal education. When one adds these classes to requirements such as professional responsibility and courses people take because the subjects appear on the bar, there aren’t that many open slots for specialization. At some point, adding classes is nice, but perhaps overkill.

A student should also evaluate whether the courses offered by a school permit effective progression from basic study to advanced possibilities. Each field has basic courses that serve as entry points of study. In the corporate law area, that would probably be a course like corporations or business associations. More advanced doctrinally oriented courses might include corporate finance, securities regulation, and mergers and acquisitions. Beyond that, students might branch out in a couple of different directions. One would be toward increasingly advanced theoretical or policy study, perhaps in a seminar with a large research project. For example, a school might offer a seminar on theories of corporate governance or applications of the efficient capital markets hypothesis. The other would be towards practical application of knowledge and skills training. These classes would include classroom skills courses like drafting or trial practice, live client clinics where students actually practice under the supervision of faculty, and externship placements in law firms, companies, or government offices.

Obviously, the course content of a particular curriculum is not the only thing that determines its quality. A lot depends on who does the teaching, a subject I will address in another post. But for now, students can probably identify schools that will serve their needs by considering not only the number of offerings in an area of interest, but also the structuring of the curriculum to provide opportunities for intellectual depth and development of skill.

  March 17, 2010 at 8:45 am  Tags: academia, Law School  Posted in: Law School (Rankings), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   5 Comments

Welcome to the Blogosphere: 20th & H Blog by Dean Fred Lawrence

posted by Daniel Solove

My dean, Fred Lawrence of George Washington University Law School, has started a new blog called 20th & H.  He writes:

20th and H was conceived as a place for me, as dean, to share with the GW Law community occasional thoughts about the Law School, legal education, and the legal profession, and to talk with you about some of the perspectives and insights I’ve gained through my work on campus and on the road.

Great idea!  Welcome to the blogosphere.

Fred has a recent post about laptops in the classroom:

For many of our students, the laptop has become almost an extension of their selves.  It’s how they take notes, research, write, and communicate; like it or not, those of us who were students in a pre-computer age simply can’t roll back the clock to a time when faculty members enjoyed the sight of rows of rapt faces and suffered at worse some inattentive doodling, note passing and an occasional nodding head.

Read more over at 20th & H.

  March 15, 2010 at 5:59 am   Posted in: Blogging, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Thoughts about choosing a law school, pt. 3

posted by Alfred Yen

Legal writing programs get staffed in 3 meaningfully different ways.  One model relies primarily on part-time instructors (generally adjunct teachers or graduate student fellows) supervised by a director of the program who is sometimes, but not always, a full-time specialist in legal writing.  A second model uses a director (sometimes, but not always, a full-time specialist) who works with faculty teaching doctrinal courses like torts or contracts to integrate writing exercises into those doctrinal courses.  A third model uses full-time faculty who specialize in teaching legal writing.  Each has its pros and cons.

Model 1 is inexpensive for a school to operate.  Adjunct faculty don’t get paid very much, so this saves faculty positions for people who will teach other subjects.  Devoting slots this way arguably benefits students in a couple of different ways.  It might mean lower student-faculty ratios in upper level classes or a wider variety of courses from which to choose.  And, it could mean more faculty publishing and advancing the school’s scholarly reputation.  (Note:  This second point may be hotly contested depending on one’s perspective.  Conventional wisdom holds that tenure-track faculty who teach outside of legal writing publish more than legal writing faculty.  This is partly because many legal writing faculty hold non-tenure track positions for which publication is not a requirement.  This may be changing as legal writing faculty have begun to hold tenure-track positions and publishing more.) All of this comes at a cost, however.  Full-time faculty who specialize in legal writing develop considerable teaching expertise.  Perhaps more than any other type of law school faculty, full-time legal writing teachers think and write about how to train lawyers.  With all due respect to those who teach legal writing as adjuncts or fellows, I think that full-time legal writing faculty will, on the whole, teach better classes than part-time faculty.  An adjunct has another job that is his primary income.  He understandably pays more attention to that than his students.  And, adjuncts frequently teach for only a few years.  Just when they’re starting to figure things out, they move on.

Model 2 has intriguing possibilities for excellence that may not always be realized.  When full-time faculty teach writing as part of a doctrinally focused course, the integration could lead to a deeper understanding of legal problems and how to write about them.  Class discussion can explicitly tie big substantive questions to challenges in writing memos or briefs.  If this works, it probably creates an excellent legal writing class.  Unfortunately, the faculty I know who have taught in these programs report that the promise is not always realized because faculty who teach doctrinal classes do not, as a whole, make legal writing a priority.  They prefer to concentrate on their substantive law specialties and their scholarship.  Only an unusually dedicated non-legal writing specialist professor will spend the time necessary to become a top-flight legal writing teacher.  Some undoubtedly do it, but others I’ve spoken to find the obligation to teach writing a burdensome distraction from teaching and writing about subjects they prefer.

Model 3 uses only full-time faculty who dedicate themselves to teaching legal writing.  The obvious benefit is the development of expertise I mentioned earlier.  Not every law professor will agree with this, but I think that top-flight legal writing teachers bring great value to their students.  Those who don’t agree may say that any of us (meaning non-legal writing law professors) could step right in and do just as good of a job, but I’m not sure it’s as simple as that.  A good legal writing course combines the reading and analysis of cases with instruction on how to write about the law.  It isn’t obvious that “just any” professor would immediately do a good job of it.  If experience matters in teaching torts, it probably matters in teaching legal writing too.  So why don’t all law schools employ a full-time staff of legal writing teachers?  Well, it’s expensive.  Full-time legal writing teachers occupy faculty slots that could be used for teachers in other areas.  A school may not think that legal writing is sufficiently important to warrant the expenditure.

From the standpoint of a prospective law student, it’s worth deciding how important legal writing will be to you.  You will have to candidly assess your writing ability, how easily you will adapt to legal conventions, and your willingness to experience stress if you’re behind fellow summer associates/new lawyers who have had more training.  To be clear, I’m not saying that legal writing should be your primary method for choosing a law school.  But, if schools are fairly close in other ways, the legal writing program is one important and frequently overlooked way to identify the right school for you.

  March 10, 2010 at 3:16 pm  Tags: academia, Law School  Posted in: Law School, Law School (Rankings), Law School (Teaching), Teaching   Print This Post   5 Comments

Thoughts about choosing a law school, part 2

posted by Alfred Yen

Let me use this post to suggest one way in which prospective students can begin comparing academic programs.  All law schools require their first year students to take a heavily prescribed curriculum.  Few, if any electives exist, and indeed the required courses are practically the same at most schools.  By contrast, second and third year students usually have great freedom to choose their courses.

The similarity between law school curriculums may give students the impression that there is little to distinguish the program of a particular school.  However, there is one area – legal writing – where schools differ a great deal.

When I went to law school, I mistakenly thought that legal writing was the least important course I would take.  And indeed, that is exactly how my alma mater, Harvard, treated it.  The course was taught by second and third year students, giving it the feel of an afterthought to the “real” courses taught by full-time faculty.  We didn’t pay much attention to it, and my education suffered for it.  After my first year of law school, I arrived as a summer associate thinking I’d be well-prepared, only to find that I knew very little about how to conduct effective legal research or write memos.  If not for the advice of a kind fellow summer associate educated at a supposedly “lesser” school, I might have failed in my first legal job.

Legal writing is important well beyond the summer associate experience.  People may think of lawyers as oralists, but cases are really won and lost on briefs.  When I practiced in California, judges issued tentative rulings based on briefs, and wouldn’t even hear argument from the “winning” side unless the “losing” side could convince the judge otherwise in a very few minutes.  And of course, transactional lawyers must document deals clearly.

Despite the importance of legal writing, most law schools do not promote the details of their legal writing programs as heavily as other things.  I can think of a few reasons.  First, legal writing was not traditionally important to elite law schools, and one could argue that it still isn’t.  Second, legal writing is not generally considered an academic discipline like torts or civil procedure.  Third, legal writing comes across as un-sexy.  Accomplished students of the sort who get into law school don’t feel good being told that their writing skills need improvement.  It’s far more exciting to tell them that a school will make them experts in international human rights.

All of these things conspire to hide the importance of legal writing to students.  Nevertheless, I’d suggest that it’s very much worthwhile for prospective students to compare legal writing programs at various schools and think about what kind of program best suits them.  In my next post, I will describe 3 general types of legal writing programs, their pros and cons, and some of the reasons that schools adopt them.

  March 8, 2010 at 5:14 pm  Tags: academia, Law School  Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   No Comments

A double whammy for diversity

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

Law firms aren’t just laying off lawyers, they’re laying off racial minority lawyers. A recent Law.com story sets out the detail:

Large U.S. law firms became less diverse last year. That’s the key finding to emerge from the latest version of our annual Diversity Scorecard, which counts attorneys of color in the U.S. offices of some 200 big firms. In each of the previous nine years that we’ve compiled the Scorecard, the percentage of minority attorneys at all participating firms increased, rising from less than 10 percent in 2000 to 13.9 percent in 2008. In 2009, for the first time, that proportion dipped, to 13.4 percent. The drop in law firm diversity may be small, but it’s important. Overall, big firms shed 6 percent of their attorneys between 2008 and 2009 — and, amid the bloodletting, lost 9 percent of their minority lawyers. . . .

The data shows that, while minority lawyers as a whole lost ground, not all groups were affected equally. In proportional terms, African-Americans lost the most: the percentage of all black lawyers fell by 13 percent (462 lawyers), with the number of black nonpartners sliding by a startling 16 percent. Translation: Almost one in six African-American nonpartners left the surveyed firms in the space of a year without being replaced. In raw numbers, Asian-Americans dropped the most, by 9 percent (556 lawyers). The number of Asian-American nonpartners dropped by 11 percent, while the number of partners rose by 6 percent. As for Hispanic lawyers, their numbers dropped by 9 percent overall (282 lawyers). Hispanic nonpartners fell by 13 percent; partners rose by 3 percent.

Meanwhile, another recent Law.com article focuses on diversity declines in law school admissions:

Research by two social scientists suggests that the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings aren’t helping legal educators build a more diverse student body. Deans and admissions officers told the researchers that the pressure to maintain or improve their U.S. News rankings can mean fewer slots for diverse students, who tend to score lower on the LSAT and have lower grade point averages. “Selectivity” — LSAT scores, undergraduate grades and schools’ degree of exclusivity in accepting applicants — accounts for one quarter of each school’s ranking. . . .

“By creating strong incentives for law schools to focus more narrowly on test scores, rankings make it seem more risky to admit diverse students when those students tend to have lower test scores,” the report says. “Moreover, rankings ratchet up the competition for poorer students and students of color with high scores….Administrators say they often feel forced to choose between a higher median LSAT score and a more diverse student body.”

To synthesize: There are no jobs for Black lawyers; but hey, there are no Black law students anyway. Double whammy.

  March 8, 2010 at 1:23 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Law Practice, Law School (Rankings), Race   Print This Post   5 Comments

Hello (again)

posted by Alfred Yen

I want to thank Larry Cunningham for his generous and kind introduction.  I greatly enjoyed my guest appearance here a couple of years ago, and I look forward to contributing my thoughts again.

The opportunity to blog here fortuitously coincides with a topic that has been in the back of my mind lately.  It’s spring, and thousands of applicants are now getting the news that they’ve been admitted to a range of schools.  How should they choose?  Over the last decade or so, rankings like U.S. News and World Report’s have become increasingly important in making those decisions.  How heavily should a would-be lawyer rely on these rankings in making her choice of where to attend?  And are there other things she should examine if rankings don’t tell the whole story?

Over the next few weeks, I intend to post some thoughts about these questions.  Like most law professors, I’m curious to see how my schools (I teach at Boston College and went to Harvard) get ranked.  But beyond that idle curiosity, I’ve thought a bit (and just a bit) about evaluating the quality of a school because I’ve had the privilege of serving on American Bar Association teams that visit schools and prepare reports for purposes of accreditation.  These visits typically last 3 days and offer team members a real “look under the hood” of what is happening at a particular school.  I’ve also had the opportunity to get to know a couple of other schools through visiting or other methods that offered more than a casual glance at their programs.  In some cases, I’ve come away convinced that schools deserve their rankings (whether high or low).  But in others, I’ve come away with the impression that a school is actually a lot better or worse than its U.S. News ranking suggests.  I am not going to discuss the specifics of those impressions, but I will try to share the general things I’ve learned in hopes that it will help those choosing law schools.

  March 4, 2010 at 8:01 am  Tags: academia, Law School  Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   No Comments

Signing Off (Plus Some Advice for Law School Admissions Committees)

posted by Adam Steinman

In the coming weeks and months, law school admissions committees will be making decisions on the Class of 2013. And they’ll be watching the numbers carefully, trying to make sure their inputs look good in the next U.S. News rankings. If your school needs help with GPA numbers but has some cushion on the LSAT, this star of MTV’s Jersey Shore could be just the ticket. As covered here, here, and here, Vinny Guadagnino boasts a 3.9 undergraduate GPA, although he calls his LSAT score “mediocre.” He says that law school’s “on the back burner,” but maybe now that his stint on the show is over he’ll be willing to entertain offers.

Speaking of stints being over, I wanted to thank Dan, Jaya, and the rest of the Concurring Opinions crew for the opportunity to guest blog here these last few weeks. I’ve really enjoyed it.

  January 29, 2010 at 11:33 am   Posted in: Culture, Law School (Rankings), Movies & Television   Print This Post   No Comments

Law School Diversity and U.S. News

posted by Solangel Maldonado

Some of you may have seen the recent study finding that the percentage of African-American and Mexican-American students in law school has decreased in the last fifteen years.  The study found that although there are 3,000 more first-year seats available today than in 1993 (the number of law schools has increased from 176 to 200), few of those seats are being filled by African-American or Mexican-American students.  As a result, African-American and Mexican-American students comprise a smaller percentage of the entering law school class than they did in 1993.  According to the ABA, the same trend is true of Puerto Rican law students, but that is not the case with all minority law students.  In fact, both the number and percentage of law students who self-identify as “Other Hispanic,” Asian, or Pacific Islander increased significantly from 1993 to 2008.

Read the rest of this post »

  January 19, 2010 at 12:23 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Overheard at AALS

posted by Dave Hoffman

Here are a few thoughts inspired by conversations I participated in or listened to at AALS (it’s not my fault that people persist in having very loud & irritating conversations over coffee, despite my dirty looks):

(1) A hiring committee chair talked about doing Google background checks on candidates for inconvenient facts. The rationale was that students would like come across pictures/stories themselves, and it was better to know than not. This struck me as an inevitable development, though sad.

(2) Many people complained about how the nametag culture at AALS encourages attendees to feel bad about themselves.  One solution offered was color-coded nametags that were keyed to the kind of social interaction you might expect.

Red: Individuals who, if spoken to, will inform you in great detail about a recent political fight on their faculty. Possible crazy. Avoid.  If you are engaged in a conversation with them, nod vigorously and say nothing.

Blue: Individuals who want a job at your school. Will laugh at your jokes and won’t look over your shoulder for at least two minutes. Engage as needed for a boost.  But don’t commit to anything.

Green: Individuals at schools you want to visit or move to. Will try to avoid you. Elevators are their weakness.

Black: Friends. Meet them later.

Orange: People who won’t deign to make eye contact with you.  There is no point in trying to hunt them down, except after they speak at a session, when they may treat you like a particularly dimwitted student.  Flattery will get you everywhere at that moment.

Purple: Members of your blog. Shouldn’t you know who they are?

Silver: Deans. Also known because they wear suits, and because they are looking at your pockets. Be careful. Their social skills are so much better than yours, that simply being near them makes you look more than ordinarily goofy.

Brown: AALS organizers, looking harried.  If you are outraged, consider engaging them at prepaid lunch over terrible food, when they are at a moral disadvantage.

(3)  I heard one professor telling another than she believed we were working “nine month” jobs since that is how the typical professor contract is worded (and since summer writing is rewarded through “grants” or “bonuses”).  I couldn’t disagree more.  Discuss.

  January 12, 2010 at 11:44 am   Posted in: Conferences, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   6 Comments

Saving the Environment

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Law professors and deans often wonder whether their work can have a real impact on the world’s problems. As I was going through my mail on Friday, I came up with a great way for all of us in legal academia to help our environment and demonstrate our commitment to green policies.

Quit sending me brochures about your law school.  I don’t vote in the U.S. News & World Report survey. Nor do I know anyone who does.  I’m willing to stipulate that your school is the best in the nation.  And I’m sure your faculty is comprised of the bravest, warmest, and most wonderful human beings in the world. All of the stuff that you send me does not Pass Go, does not collect $200, and goes straight in the trash.  I know that the law school rankings create incentives for this sort of behavior, but please — enough already.

  September 12, 2009 at 1:40 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   12 Comments

A Logic Puzzle

posted by Gerard Magliocca

Several conclusions can be drawn from the following comparison. Which one do you take away?

1. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court described the admissions goals of the University of Michigan Law School (and law schools more generally) this way: “Our conclusion that the Law School has a compelling interest in a diverse student body is informed by our view that that attaining a diverse student body is at the heart of the Law School’s educational mission . . . [T]he Law School’s admissions policy promotes ‘cross-racial understanding,’ helps to break down racial stereotypes, and ‘enables [students] to better understand persons of different races.’ These benefits are ‘important and laudable,’ because ‘classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting’ when the students have ‘the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.’ . . . Numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.’

2. . Consideration of diversity in the U.S. News and World Report Rankings: None

  April 24, 2009 at 8:20 am   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   8 Comments

A Foucauldian View of Law School Rankings

posted by Frank Pasquale

Sociologists Michael Sauder and Wendy Nelson Espeland (NE&S) recently published an insightful article on the disciplinary function of law school rankings. They apply both Foucauldian and organizational theory to “unpack the power and influence of rankings as a peculiar type of environmental pressure.” They conclude:

[that r]ankings simultaneously seduce and coerce, and . . . [the fact that] this complex interplay of co-optation and resistance is conducted in the bland language of numbers makes it all the more compelling. At schools with improving rankings, even critics may find it hard to avoid a flush of pride, along with relief and anxiety about next year. The allure of rankings may be subtle, but it shapes resistance while securing the engagement of critics and supporters alike.

NE&S document several responses to the culture of rankings. I found their description of a dialectical “gaming/surveillance” dynamic particularly interesting, given some recent research I’ve been doing on trade secret protection for ranking algorithms:

Read the rest of this post »

  March 13, 2009 at 8:43 am   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   3 Comments

How is Tom Barr Like Shane Battier: Or, Measuring Individuals’ Roles in Group Success

posted by Dave Hoffman

Michael Lewis recently published a Times Magazine story on NBA player Shane Battier. The article is largely an anecdotally driven portrait of Battier, a player who supposedly makes his teammates better and opposing players worse, while engrossing few individual gains. But the Houston Rockets, who employ Battier, recognize his value, because they’ve finally cracked the nut of regressing success in group sports. According to Lewis, the Rockets use a sophisticated plus-minus measure:

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.”

The problem with the article is that it offers no perspective at all on how the Rockets tweak the statistic to make it useful and a competitive advantage. In that sense, the piece could be thought of as Moneyball III: This Time With No Data and No Human Interest. (Moneyball Had Data; Blind Side had a compelling story; this piece is unripe on both fronts.)

Nevertheless, in some quarters Lewis’s work has again caught the attention of legal innovators. Jim Chen, who has already opined that Deans should use a version of plus-minus to evaluate faculty performance, suggests that Battier is a promising case study: “the single factor that makes a great team player is the mirror image of the single factor that turns even the most productive scholar into a toxic Arschloch: selfishness.” To which an astute commentator responded: “If anything, a stats-driven evaluation process will almost certainly lead to the Battiers of academia being under-rewarded, rather than the reverse. Wouldn’t it be enough to reward those who just seem to distinguish themselves by their selflessness? . . . Note that, even within the NBA — in which it is much easier to do a plus/minus assessment — Battier gets undervalued by most teams, and if he weren’t still riding a six year contract would probably get paid a lot less even by the Rockets.”

Read the rest of this post »

  March 2, 2009 at 12:32 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   4 Comments

Announcing the Moss Law School Rankings: Harvard #1, Yale #2!

posted by Scott Moss

Congratulations to Harvard on ranking #1 in the newly minted Moss Law School Rankings! Below are the raw statistics, which I explain below:

#1: Harvard (7 points)

#2: Yale (4 points)

#3: Tulane (3 points)

#4: NYU (2 points)

#5: Georgetown (2 points)

#5: Cincinnati (2 points)

#5: Rutgers (2 points)

#5: Pepperdine (2 points)

#5: Louisiana State (2 points)

#10: Fordham (1 point)

#10: Washington & Lee (1 point)

My ranking is unorthodox, I admit, but all the great statistical innovations yield unintuitive outcomes, no? Let me explain my methodology.

Read the rest of this post »

  December 12, 2008 at 10:38 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   20 Comments

Do Mailings Lead to Better Rankings?

posted by Susan Kuo

A haiku to celebrate the season:

Fall is in the air.

Law school mailings everywhere.

Rankings on the rise?

It’s fall, the season for tailgating, bonfires, and trick-or-treating. It’s also the time of the year when the U.S. News and World Report Magazine begins collecting data for the purpose of ranking U.S. law schools. When I check my work mailbox, I can almost always count on receiving postcards, pamphlets, magazines, and other mailings from law schools extolling the virtues of their programs and recent faculty hires. One of my colleagues – my most recently tenured colleague – even received law school swag.

Do these mailings actually positively impact the rankings of the schools that send them? Last year, the ranking methodology for law schools included a quality assessment based on two scores – a peer assessment score and an assessment score by lawyers and judges. Do these mailings lead to higher peer assessments and assessments by lawyers and judges?

  October 20, 2008 at 6:15 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   4 Comments

A Voter Aptitude Test for U.S. News Law Rank Voters?

posted by Geoffrey Rapp

Professors are ablog about the U.S. News ballots recently arrived in law school mailrooms around the country. At Moneylaw, rankings guru Tom Bell (Chapman Law) relates interesting news of possible voting irregularities in the academic reputation balloting — with individuals other than deans, associate deans, recruiting chairs and most-recently-tenured profs receiving ballots even though they aren’t supposed to be U.S. News voters. At Prawfs, Jason Solomon (Georgia) reminds voters they are supposed to be assessing schools’ quality, rather than reputation.

Read the rest of this post »

  October 17, 2008 at 1:00 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   4 Comments

Should the US News Ranking Include Part-Time and Evening Law Students?

posted by Daniel Solove

Via Brian Leiter, I learned that Rob Morse, the ranking czar of the US News law school rankings is considering including the LSAT and GPA stats for part-time and evening JD students in its calculations for law school rankings. Morse writes:

The first idea is that U.S. News should count both full-time and part-time entering student admission data for median LSAT scores and median undergraduate grade-point averages in calculating the school’s ranking. U.S. News’s current law school ranking methodology counts only full-time entering student data. Many people have told us that some law schools operate part-time J.D. programs for the purpose of enrolling students who have far lower LSAT and undergrad GPAs than the students admitted to the full-time program in order to boost their admission data reported to U.S. News and the ABA. In other words, many contend that these aren’t truly separate part-time programs but merely a vehicle to raise a law school’s LSAT and undergrad GPA for its U.S. News ranking. We have used only full-time program data because we believed that the part-time law programs were truly separate from the full-time ones. That no longer appears to be the case at many law schools. So, it can be argued that it is better analytically to compare the LSAT and undergrad GPAs of the entire entering class at all schools rather than just the full-time program data.

While much in the US News rankings should be changed, this change would wreak more havoc on legal education than it will solve. It is true that schools game the system with part-time and evening students, but any change should be focused on the gaming, not on including LSAT and GPAs of part-timers and evening students in with the law school’s regular LSAT/GPA stats. Leiter writes:

For many, probably most, part-time programs serve older, working students, who might not have time for fancy LSAT prep courses, but who bring levels of dedication, seriousness, and pertinent experience that enrich legal education and the legal profession. What a loss it will be if, out of fear of US News, schools start cutting back their part-time programs or rejecting these students whose numerical credentials might impede their crusade for a “higher ranking.”

I wholeheartedly agree. The result will be a dramatic curtailment of evening and part-time programs unless schools want to take a hit in their ranking. This will penalize schools with such programs, and I bet these programs will shrink rather dramatically if US News makes this change.

First, since many students in these programs are older and have been working many years following graduation from their colleges, their GPAs don’t matter as much. Such programs are a way to accommodate students who may not have excelled in their undergraduate studies but who have blossomed in the years afterward.

Second, these programs are also an small escape valve from the tyranny of the LSAT, which is often the end-all and be-all of law school admissions. While the LSAT is important and is correlated to successful performance at law school, it is also true that many students who didn’t do well on the LSAT also have success in law school and in their legal careers. Furthermore, statistically, several minority groups generally have lower LSAT scores than whites. The LSAT shouldn’t dominate so heavily in law school admissions, but it does (due in large part to the US News rankings). At least the evening and part-time programs could escape from this problem, but if US News makes the proposed change, there will be no escape.

Read the rest of this post »

  July 1, 2008 at 10:49 am   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   14 Comments

This Month’s SSRN Rankings

posted by Dave Hoffman

Following up on postings in February 2008 and May 2007, here’s this month’s SSRN download ranking, measured by total new downloads. (The numbers in parentheses are the rankings from February. Total new downloads for these fifty institutions: 914,252)

1 George Washington University – Law School (1)

2 Harvard University – Harvard Law School (2)

3 Columbia University – Columbia Law School (3)

4 University of Chicago – Law School (4)

5 Yale University – Law School (6)

6 University of Texas at Austin – School of Law (5)

7 University of California, Los Angeles – School of Law (7)

8 Georgetown University – Law Center (9)

9 Stanford Law School (8)

10 New York University – School of Law (11)

11 University of Illinois College of Law (10)

12 University of Pennsylvania Law School (12)

13 University of California, Berkeley – School of Law (13)

14 Vanderbilt University – School of Law (14)

15 University of Minnesota – Twin Cities – School of Law (16)

16 George Mason University – School of Law (18)

17 Duke University – School of Law (17)

18 University of Tennessee, Knoxville – College of Law (15)

19 University of San Diego – School of Law (19)

20 University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – Law School (20)

21 University of Southern California – Law School (21)

22 Northwestern University – School of Law (22)

23 Temple University – James E. Beasley School of Law (28)

24 Florida State University – College of Law (25)

25 Boston University – School of Law (27)

26 Fordham University – School of Law (24)

27 Yeshiva University – Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (26)

28 American University – Washington College of Law (31)

29 Loyola Law School – Los Angeles (23)

30 University of Virginia – School of Law (29)

31 Cornell University – School of Law (34)

32 Ohio State University – Michael E. Moritz College of Law (30)

33 Suffolk University Law School (32)

34 Emory University – School of Law (36)

35 University of Louisville – Louis D. Brandeis School of Law (37)

36 Brooklyn Law School (35)

37 Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington (33)

38 Chapman University – School of Law (38)

39 St. John’s University – School of Law (43)

40 University of Florida – Fredric G. Levin College of Law (47)

41 Case Western Reserve University – School of Law (41)

42 Notre Dame Law School (40)

43 Boston College – Law School (39)

44 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – School of Law-Camden (44)

45 University of Houston Law Center (Off-list)

46 Wayne State University Law School (Off-list)

47 Loyola University of Chicago – School of Law (Off-list)

48 University of Arizona – James E. Rogers College of Law (46)

49 Northern Kentucky University – Salmon P. Chase College of Law (Off-list)

50 Seton Hall University – School of Law (48)

  May 11, 2008 at 11:41 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Contradictory Goals of Law School Rankings

posted by Daniel Solove

As usual, a ton of blogospheric attention has been devoted to the US News law school rankings. Over at PrawfsBlawg, Geoffrey Rapp has found a way to get the numerical rankings of law schools in the Third and Fourth Tiers. At TaxProf, Paul Caron ranks the law schools by reputation score. At Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports, Brian Leiter offers suggestions for improving the rankings. At Law Librarian Blog, Joe Hodnicki tracks law school rankings from 1996-present. I, too, have posted about the US News Rankings.

If we step back from this year’s frenzy, I believe that there’s an important fact about law school rankings that accounts for much of the displeasure about them. Law school ranking systems have contradictory goals. Here’s why. Law schools, like many institutions, are not incredibly dynamic and changing in the short term. They often change slowly, not dramatically. The result: We shouldn’t see much movement year to year in the rankings. Most schools should stay about where they are. A few schools might move over time, but any one year’s movement is not significant in the grand scheme of things. So to be accurate, rankings shouldn’t change all that much.

But rankings systems have a contradictory goal: They need to reflect some kind of change, or else looking at the rankings each year would be like watching glaciers move. There must be some drama in the rankings year by year. We eagerly await our rankings each year, and we don’t want rankings at five or ten year intervals. And we don’t want stable rankings — we want changes to cheer and kvetch about.

There is another value in rankings reflecting some degree of change each year beyond our enjoyment of babbling on about them. Law schools work very hard on hiring new and lateral professors, promoting their reputations, improving their schools, increasing their admissions selectivity, and so on. We want our work to be reflected in a tangible manner. We want results for a year’s worth of hard work in improving the school. We don’t want to wait a decade or longer to see results. Unfortunately, the US News rankings often don’t reflect this work very well. But they do show that something is happening. We can then complain about the disconnect between what we’re doing and our ranking: “We did all this, and our ranking hasn’t moved. Damn that US News for their flawed system!” Or, we can justify rises in our rankings: “We’ve moved up several spots in the rankings. This is, of course, due to all the wonderful improvements we’ve been making to our school.” Either way, at least we have something to talk about.

The reality is that probably very little we do has much effect vis-a-vis our ranking with other schools over a period of time. We might improve our faculty by hiring some great laterals, but over the course of time, our competitor schools will also likely have done the same. True, one school might outpace another, but big shifts are the exception not the norm.

So the rankings need to reflect a state of affairs that is largely static, with a few gradual changes over the course of a long time. They must do so in a way that keeps people interested and excited. The rankings must display glacial change in a dramatic way. To use another metaphor, the rankings must make a turtle race seem exciting.

Read the rest of this post »

  April 1, 2008 at 12:06 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   11 Comments

• « Older Entries