This Month's SSRN Rankings

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)

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 11:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Contradictory Goals of Law School Rankings

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.

A few years ago, Dan Filler and I created a chart of the US News rankings for the top 25 law schools from 1997 to 2006. The interesting thing about the chart is how little movement most schools demonstrated over the course of time. Let's look at Cornell Law School. In 1997, they were 12, then their ranking went like this over the next decade: 12, 10, 10, 12, 13, 10, 12, 11, 13, 12. When they drifted from 10 to 13 over the course of a few years, there were probably cries of outrage for dropping out of the top 10. When they suddenly jumped from 13 to 10, they probably celebrated with great cheers. Headline: "Cornell dramatically rises to the top 10!" In reality, Cornell is trapped in an orbit around 11.5 (that's their average ranking over the past decade). And they barely go much higher or much lower than that. From year to year, it appears that there is something going on -- Cornell appears to be moving. But it's just a clever illusion, created by US News to achieve the two contradictory goals of rankings.

Paul Caron provides links to law schools responding to this year's rankings. David Lat collects emails from law schools responding to rankings fluctuations.

At the end of the day, I believe in the following points:
1. For the average law school, US News ranking doesn't change that dramatically. Only a few law schools make any major advances or drops in rankings.
2. In reality, schools don't change that rapidly. Some schools that appear to have moved significantly in their US News ranking may have moved due to changes in methodology more than actual changes in the institution.
3. The legal world goes into a frenzy each year when the rankings come out, but changes in the rankings from one year to the next can't possibly have any meaning. What matters is changes that occur over the course of a long period of time.
4. US News knows how to sell issues. Its rankings must change each year, or else nobody would care to buy the issue each year. It knows the two contradictory goals for rankings systems. It's solution is a rankings system that shuffles things around a little bit each year, enough to give us the drama we crave. Although most schools go up and down each year, over the course of time, they basically stay in the same place.

Is is true that some schools move significantly over a period of time. So there are exceptions, but there aren't very many.

To be more meaningful, rankings should probably be done in five-year intervals rather than one-year intervals. Information over the course of five years should be factored into the rankings, not just information for any one given year. Would such a ranking system be successful? Probably not. US News wants to sell issues each year, not every five years. Moreover, we don't want to wait every five years for a new ranking. We want something exciting to talk about each spring.

And so the game will continue on. . . .

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 12:06 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

US News 2009

They again seem to have leaked early at lawschooldiscussion.org: read 'em and weep. Swayed by some of the arguments Brian Leiter makes here, I'm not going to reproduce the list. (And besides, it seems like the folks who excavated the information deserve the hits, not that the equities much matter or that others will feel the same way.). After satiating your curiosity, come back here and talk about ways to make the system better.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 11:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Improving the US News Rankings: A Wish List

A new article in the ABA Journal profiles Bob Morse, the US News & World Report "rankings czar." I recently corresponded with Bob when he wrote to me about my parody of the rankings. He took my humor in good spirit. According to the ABA Journal article:

Since it began the rankings in 1987, the magazine is often attacked as wielding too much power; its methodology is denounced as easily manipulated and too subjective to carry such inordinate weight.

No one understands this more than Robert Morse, the man who created the law school rankings for U.S. News. As the magazine’s data research director, Morse says he, too, feels a high level of anxiety each year when the law school rankings are revealed. . . .

He also feels the heat from those who resent their enduring influence. For a ratings czar, he is a very re­luctant despot. Far from being impervious to complaint, he maintains a blog where he explains his rankings and encourages constructive criticism. He’s been known to show up unannounced at gatherings likely to denounce him.

The article goes on to note that Bob Morse is open to suggestions for improving the rankings:

Morse says he understands and agrees that the rankings are not perfect, and he would like nothing more than to discuss with law school deans ways to improve them.

"Deans are welcome to call me or come by my office in Washington,” Morse says. “I want to work with them to improve the rankings."

For better or worse, the US News rankings are here to stay. They are tremendously influential, and despite our constant complaints, I doubt that the influence of the rankings will diminish. So we can continue to gripe and grumble, with probably little effect. Or, we might be to work with the magazine to improve the rankings. Bob says he's amenable to suggestions for improvement:

Bob Morse has his own blog that invites comments and criticisms. He’s shown up uninvited to university symposiums dedicated to fighting the U.S. News rankings he created. He wants to hear what the critics have to say.

So since Bob is listening, I pose the question: How ought the rankings to be improved?

The current US News methodology is here.

Here are a few things I'd recommend:

1. The reputation surveys are not sent out broadly enough. They go out only to deans and to newly-tenured professors. A broader cross-section of law school faculties should be used in the poll.

2. A more granular reputation scoring system should be used. The current 1-5 score isn't granular enough. For starters, how do top schools like Yale and Harvard have average scores less than 5. Who's giving them a score of 4? Seems fishy to me. Suppose a dean thinks Yale is the best and that Chicago is excellent -- not quite as good as Yale, but very close. Yale therefore gets a 5. Does that mean Chicago gets a 4? That's a big drop. Giving Chicago a 5 says it is equal, which may not be the dean's view. There's a problem here -- the scale isn't granular enough.

3. The number of library volumes shouldn't be a part of the scoring system. This strikes me as a silly factor in ranking law schools.

These are just a few ideas. What are yours? The purpose of this thread is not to gripe about the rankings, but to propose fixes and improvements, so please focus your comments on suggestions for reforming the US News rankings.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 08:11 PM | Comments (23) | TrackBack

The Official Leaked US News Law School Rankings, Plus Ranking Secrets Revealed!

I've got the scoop of the year! An anonymous source from US News & World Report leaked this memo to me. It is a memo written by the magazine’s “law school ranking executive” describing how the magazine arrived at this year’s official rankings.

See below for a sneak peak at this year's rankings as well as some amazing secrets about how US News ranks law schools.

UPDATE: I was contacted by Bob Morse at US News & World Report. He reports that although he realizes it was a joke, some people have been emailing US News, thinking that this is really a leaked memo. News flash to the very gullible: The memo is fake. After all, could the real ranking process possibly be as rational as the memo?

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 12:54 AM | TrackBack

A Market in Rankings?

Complaining about law school rankings is a cottage industry in the legal academy. (Or rather more than a cottage industry, I suppose.) Everyone -- or nearly everyone -- dislikes the current system, and while I am less skeptical than most -- it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that students planning on shelling out $70,000+ in tuition might want some comparative measure of quality -- I agree that the current system leaves something to be desired. It seems to me that we could set up a market based solution.

A student recently suggested to me that inTrade ought to set up a prediction market in U.S. News Rankings. That way students could hedge against the risk that the value of their degree may drop if their school shifts in the rankings. It is not a bad idea, but the problem is that such a market -- while allowing a bit of U.S. News risk arbitrage and hedging -- would ultimately be about simply predicting the mysteries of the U.S. News system. Suppose, however, that we set up contracts for something other than U.S. News status. For example, one might purchase a contract predicting that West Dakota Law School's graduates would have an average starting salary of $100,000 or more. This would provide information of the kind that most students care about. Alternatively, one might create a contract that pays out if East Carolina Law School's faculty places 10 articles in top-ten law reviews this year or some other measure of scholarly accomplishment. Then we could compare the share prices for Harvard and Yale. Of course, we would still just be getting a market in prediction of a particular outcome, rather than actual quality, but it might not be a bad proxy and it might capture more of the dispersed knowledge about law school quality. Of course, in order for the system to work you would need a relatively thick market in the contracts offered and even if there were only three or four contracts per law school, the number of contracts available in the market would be huge. On the other hand, law profs and law students are nothing if not obsessed with status, and I suspect that there would be a sizable contingent eager to cash in on their obsession.

What do you say? What contracts do you think inTrade should offer?

Posted by Nate Oman at 12:59 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Green Bag Asks: Your Law School (Really) Got Game?

This year, my last, at Ole Miss Law School, I was asked to Chair an ad hoc faculty committee on law school rankings. Like many law schools, ours has been flustered by the seemingly arbitrary way that our school has fluctuated in the U.S. News & World Report yearly rankings. And like others, we wanted not to care about such capricious things, but alas, others (including prospective students, current students, and alumni to name a few) did care. So as an institution we (myself and four faculty committee members) set out to study the factors one by one and try to determine where we could change policies, add money, etc., to constructively move factors that we had some control over.

What struck me during last semester as the committee met on a bi-weekly basis was that some schools that were perpetually labeled elite (by being in the First Tier) really did not have that many prolific or productive scholars. On the other hand, the opposite was also true: many a Third and Fourth Tier (though certainly not all) were bustling with faculty activity and innovation. So what was going on? Why wasn't any current ranking system capturing these characteristics of the law school market?

Though I have not figured out the answer to this question, Inside Higher Ed reports today that The Green Bag Journal plans to put law school's extravagant claims about having the best and greatest faculties in the universe to the test:

On their Web sites and in the other marketing materials that law schools distribute to raise their profiles — sometimes derided as “law porn” — virtually every law school boasts of having a faculty made up of stellar scholars, brilliant teachers and selfless public servants. “We continue to add depth to our already diverse and multifaceted faculty — excellent teachers whose high-quality research impacts leading academic and public policy issues,” reads the Web site of Northwestern University’s law school . . . .

But how are applicants — for admission and/or jobs — to know whether the schools are living up to their promises on faculty quality, that all-important indicator of the institutions’ overall quality? asks the Green Bag, which describes itself as “an entertaining journal of law.” . . . .

The Green Bag plans to step into that breach, the journal announces in an editorial in its forthcoming issue. Starting this spring, it will begin work on the “Deadwood Report,” which it envisions being an annual assessment of “whether faculty members do the work that the law schools say they do.” The journal acknowledges that the ranking will provide “rough and admittedly partial” measures of law school faculty quality, but posits that by being transparent (it will disclose the sources of its data and how it derives its numbers and rankings from those data), and by bringing more information into public view, “it will help law school applicants make better decisions about where to study or work.... We are trying to do some good here.” (The editors have an ulterior motive, too: compelling law schools to make public better information about their operations — more on that later.)

What exactly will the Deadwood Report measure? Law schools, the editors write, “generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to teaching, scholarship, and service.” They argue that the best teachers tend to be active scholars and vice versa, “and all the best lawyers of every stripe engage in service for the public good.... Evidence of the law schools’ commitment to this view is reflected in the practically universal requirement of high achievement in all three areas for tenure. And so we should be able to say with some confidence that a good law school will have a faculty consisting of hard-working teacher-scholar-humanitarians,” the Green Bag editorial says.

Count me as very intrigued by this idea which animates the Deadwood project. I hope it sheds light on those schools who are coasting on old reputations made, on schools stuck in institutional inertia, and on those that are breaking new ground and deserve a second look.

And maybe even Green Bag will start a law school dean bobblehead series based on its Deadwood Report.

Posted by Paul Secunda at 10:13 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Ridiculously Unscientific Ranking: SSRN February Edition

The February 2008 SSRN law school rankings based on downloads are out. I thought I'd be irresponsible and compare the data to the list compiled in May, 2007, when I last republished rankings based on new downloads.* The number in the parenthesis represents the change, the "big" number is the total new downloads. Snarky comments in brackets are mine.

1. George Washington University - Law School 80571 (+10) [They've got nothing to hide!]
2. Harvard University - Harvard Law School 53984 (-1)
3. Columbia University - Columbia Law School 37401 (-2)
4. University of Chicago - Law School 35080 (same)
5. University of Texas at Austin 30469 (-2) [A prediction market, anticipating Leiter's departure?]
6. Yale University - Law School 30317 (+1)
7. University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law 29491 (-2)
8. Stanford Law School 28123 (-2)
9. Georgetown University - Law Center 26502 (same)
10. University of Illinois - College of Law 25501 (+2)
11. New York University - School of Law 23416 (+2)
12. University of Pennsylvania Law School 23165 (+5)
13. University of California, Berkeley - School of Law (Boalt Hall) 22649 (+2)
14. Vanderbilt University - School of Law 19329 (same)
15. University of Tennessee, Knoxville - College of Law 18094 (+15) [Instapundit deploys!]
16. University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - School of Law 17226 (same)
17. Duke University - School of Law 14477 (+2)
18. George Mason University - School of Law 14206 (+4)
19. University of San Diego - School of Law 14096 (+2)
20. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Law School 13048 (+3)
21. University of Southern California - Law School 12993 (-1)
22. Northwestern University - School of Law 12811 (-4)
23. Loyola Law School - Los Angeles 12222 (+3)
24. Fordham University - School of Law 12132 (+8)
25. Florida State University - College of Law 11518 (-1)
26. Yeshiva University - Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law 11159 (+1)
27. Boston University - School of Law 11050 (+2)
28. Temple University 10569 (+9) [Validates entire SSRN ranking project]
29. University of Virginia - School of Law 10212 (-1)
30. Ohio State University - Michael E. Moritz College of Law 10012 (-20) [@#$@]
31. American University - Washington College of Law 9902 (+17)
32. Suffolk University Law School 8711 (Offlist)
33. Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington 8521 (-1)
34. Cornell University - School of Law 8369 (-3)
35. Brooklyn Law School 8228 (Offlist)
36. Emory University - School of Law 8217 (-28)
37. University of Louisville - Louis D. Brandeis School of Law 7116 (Offlist)
38. Chapman University - School of Law 7092 (Offlist)
39. Boston College - Law School 6703 (-14)
40. Notre Dame Law School 6613 (-1)
41. Case Western Reserve University - School of Law 6579 (-6)
42. University of Colorado Law School 6182 (-4)
43. St. John's University - School of Law 6030 (Offlist)
44. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - School of Law-Camden 5927 (-2)
45. Washington University, St. Louis - School of Law (-5)
46. University of Arizona - James E. Rogers College of Law 5630 (-1)
47. University of Florida - Fredric G. Levin College of Law 5595 (Offlist)
48. Seton Hall University - School of Law 5491 (+2)
49. University of Iowa - College of Law 5466 (Offlist)
50. New York Law School 5447 (Offlist)

*You can slice these data many ways, including per capita, total downloads, total papers. In my view, all methods are similarly (un)scientific.

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 04:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Interdisciplinarity, Leiter and the Bluebook

Gordon Smith has a nice summary post of the debate between Brian Leiter, Mary Dudziak and others on whether Brian's faculty citation rankings accurately measure "impact in legal scholarship."

The basic framework of the debate is

Objection: "But you didn't measure X..."
Leiter: "True. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and do your own data collection!"

(Which strikes me as pretty persuasive.) I wanted to add a different ingredient into the pot. I think Leiter's rankings mismeasure impact in interdisciplinary scholarship for a reason unrelated to his methodology or its merits. Simply put: the Bluebook itself undervalues interdisciplinary collaborations and thus scholarship.

I'm not nearly the first to observe that the Bluebook's citation rules have an ideological component. See, e.g., Christine Hurt's great piece on that very topic. But consider the interaction between Bluebook Rule 15.1, 16 and Leiter's study. R.16 states that the citation of author names in signed law review articles should follow Rule 15.1. R. 15.1 states that when there are two or more authors, you have a choice:

Either use the first author's name followed by "ET AL." or list all of the authors' names. Where saving space is desired, and in short form citations, the first method is suggested . . Include all authors' names when doing so is particular relevant.

This seems to me to express a pretty strong non-listing preference. The "problem" is that much good interdisciplinary work results from collaborations among more than two authors - it is the nature of the beast. Take, for example, my colleague Jaya Ramji-Nogales' forthcoming triple-authored article Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication, which was front-paged by the Times back in June. Two of the article's authors are in danger of being ET AL.'ed in many law review footnotes, and consequently ignored in subsequent Leiter citation counts (unless the citing article's author chooses to mention them by name in the text). This seems like a trivial objection, but it will take on increasing weight over the next ten years as empirical legal studies really comes online in the major law reviews. (Obviously, I'm writing in part because I've two articles in the pipeline where I'm a part of three-author teams, and the "et al." problem is somewhat salient.)

Bluebook editors: I know you are lurking here! Can you fix this silly problem in the 19th edition?

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 01:12 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Leiter Study Data: Concentration by School

Brian Leiter’s study Most Cited Law Professors By Specialty, 2000-07 ranked institutions based on how many faculty were in the Top 10 or 20 for each field, plus "Runners-Up" and “Other Highly Cited Scholars Who Don’t Work Exclusively In This Area” with over 1000 citations. On the assumption that faculty in the latter categories are also meaningful even if they had fewer than 1000 citations, I aggregated all 400-plus names in the study by institution.

Even if the study measures not merit, quality, or influence, but only citations in a particular Westlaw database, I was surprised by the concentration. Only 62 schools are represented, less than 1/3d of accredited law schools account for all Most Cited scholars. There was a steep curve within the 62; the top ten represent over half of the scholars; the top 19 (actually 23 with ties) over 75%; the top 39 (45 with ties) over 95%. Less than 5% work where they are the only highly cited faculty member.

There may be less concentration here than meets the eye. The categories are debatable; as the study itself says, for example, Business Law "encompasses a huge range of really quite different topics"; I for one think it would be more useful if Corporations, Antitrust, Commercial Law and probably a couple of others were broken out; perhaps more schools would be represented if there were more categories. In addition, there are many Runners-Up to the Runners-Up with high citation counts--the faculties of Washington and Lee and Boston College, for example, have high average citation counts, but no one on the list. There is also the question of cause. Part of the explanation is undoubtedly the Imperial Scholar theory advanced by highly cited Richard Delgado; "insiders" cite other insiders. But the list is too large for that to be a complete explanation. I suspect that this data means the lateral market is robust and driven in large part by something correlated with citations (such as, for example, citations). Some new guest blogger should do a study; I'll bet the number of laterals on the list is very high. In any event, here are schools ranked based on the total number of people teaching there who are in the Most Cited study, either as Top 10/20, "Runner Up", or "Other Highly Cited":

1. Harvard 33
2. Yale 31
3. NYU 30
4. Stanford 22
5. Chicago 21
6. Berkeley 19
7. Columbia 17
7. Michigan 17
9. Georgetown 15
9. Texas 15
11. UCLA14
12. Northwestern 12
12. Vanderbilt 12
14. Cornell 10
15. Duke 8
16. GW 7
16. Minnesota 7
16. Penn 7
19. Arizona 6
19. Hastings 6
19. Illinois 6
19. Virginia 6
19. USD 6
24. Ohio State 5
25. ASU 4
25. BU 4
25. Cardozo 4
25. Davis 4
25. Florida 4
25. Fordham 4
25. Miami 4
25. Pittsburgh 4
33. Brooklyn 3
33. Emory 3
33. George Mason 3
33. Houston 3
33. Iowa 3
33. USC 3
39. Colorado 2
39. FSU 2
39. Irvine 2
39. Maryland 2
39. Rutgers, Newark 2
39. Temple 2
39. Washington University 2
46. Albany 1
46. Case Western 1
46. Chicago-Kent 1
46. Connecticut 1
46. DePaul 1
46. Hofstra 1
46. Indiana 1
46. North Carolina 1
46. Northeastern 1
46. Notre Dame 1
46. Rutgers, Camden 1
46. South Carolina 1
46. Southwestern 1
46. Tulane 1
46. USF 1
46. Wake Forest 1
46. Wisconsin 1 (62)

Posted by Jack Chin at 02:01 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Law Schools Ranked Lower Than Their Parent Universities

Last week I mentioned that Professor Paul Caron had compiled a chart of law schools ranked higher than their parent universities. Now, Paul has compiled a chart of law schools ranked lower than their parent universities.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 01:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More on Law School Rankings vs. Parent University Rankings

Earlier this week, I blogged about Paul Caron's chart of law schools that were ranked more highly than their parent universities. Some commenters pointed out that because not all universities have law schools, there is a greater chance that universities might be ranked lower (because there are more of them).

Paul now has a new chart. He writes: "[S]ince U.S News ranks more national universities (262) than law schools (184), a more meaningful measure would look at the disparity by percentiles rather than in absolute rank."

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 11:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Law School Rankings vs. Parent University Rankings

Over at TaxProf, Professor Paul Caron has a chart of law schools that outrank their parent universities in the US News rankings. Some law schools far outrank their universities. I often wonder what effect the standing of the main university has on a law school. Paul's chart demonstrates that law schools can thrive in the rankings even when their parents are not highly-ranked. Does this mean that law schools can establish a reputation that is by and large unaffected by the ranking of their parents? Or perhaps they would be ranked even higher but for their parents. Is their ranking differential due to greater reputation scores? Or do other US News factors account for the differential?

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 11:42 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

A Law Porn Blog

It's known as "law porn" -- those glossy brochures that arrive in torrents in every professor's mailbox touting the wonderful accomplishments of law schools. There's been a recent swell in posting lately in the legal blogosphere about law porn -- from tips by David Bernstein about how best to produce the porn to Jeff Harrison's plea for a Do Not Mail list.

Why does law porn exist? To raise up a law school's US News Ranking. Law schools like to tout their accomplishments. Without law porn, how would we know that Professor X published a new book? Or that Professor Y spoke at the school? Or that the school put on a symposium? Or that Professor Z got an honorary degree from the University of Antarctica Law School?

Brian Leiter has devoted a significant amount of time to mocking the obscene claims made within some law school promotional materials.

What should be done? How do we stamp out law porn?

The answer, I believe, is to give the law schools a different outlet for releasing all this information. After all, we want to encourage law schools to do the kinds of things depicted in law porn -- publish articles and books, hold conferences, have faculty workshops, and otherwise create a vibrant intellectual community. We want this healthy activity to be reflected in a law school's ranking. We just don't like it placed in our mailboxes.

My solution is for law schools to create a law porn blog. A representative from each school can post about the various news, conferences, and publications at the school. Of course, it need not be called "law porn blog," although with a moniker like that, I'm sure it would enhance the visitor traffic. But a blog can serve as a centralized resource for announcing law school news, and it can save countless money and trees.

So we don't need to end law porn -- just steer it to a new venue, an online red-light district for the legal blogosphere. It's time for the law schools to join together to create a law porn blog.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 02:43 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

In Praise of Market Imperfections

You would expect to go out of business if you hired people without knowing if they could do the job. And, the same would be true if you had no reliable way of measuring if they actually were doing the job once they were hired. Law Schools do both of these. They would prefer to hire second tier students from elite law schools rather than top students form non elite schools. Yet, the empirical evidence I know of shows that the scholarly production of the non elites once hired is no lower than that of the elites. In fact, since law reviews use credentials as a basis for article selection, non elites may be actually outperforming elites. Do we have any reliable way to evaluate what the new hires do? Give me a break. We have faculty classroom visits announced ahead of time that result in evaluations that could have been written ahead of time – all positive given the propensity of law professors to shirk from institutional responsibilites. And we have student evaluations that largely reflect expected grades. On scholarship, we send the articles to a list of reviewers influenced by the candidate or just the regular suppliers of positive letters. Be grateful for market imperfections!

Posted by Jeffrey Harrison at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Law School Capture

My blogging schitk is grousing about legal education. I do this mainly on moneylaw and classsbias and serve as a technical advisor to privilegelaw – a blog that must be read starting earlier and moving to more recent. In many respects I think legal education has been captured by and run for the convenience of faculty who are far more often than not the children of privilege. (If you are already preparing to comment, I ask that you skip it if the comment is about a law professor who is not a child of privilege.) As I blog along this month these themes will become more developed. First, here is a test to examine your own school for its level of capture.

Before taking the test there are some clarifications. There is good and bad capture. I can imagine a law school captured by the faculty and, with or without help from the administration, run for the benefit of stakeholders. This would be faculty that is constantly asking “What should we be doing”? and matching it against what it is doing. On the other hand, capture can mean that a faculty runs the law school for its convenience with only modest limitations imposed by others and even here observing the limits are part of a pattern of self-interested behavior.

Second, from time to time I get an email that carries with it the assumption that all my grousing is about my own School. Wrong! The examples are not all taken from my School, and if you really called my bluff I would not bet that my school is any different than the average. So how does your school stack up on the capture quiz: (you can give your school partial points)

1. Are classes scheduled mid week and mid day even though it means conflicts that limit student choices? (1 point for a yes.)

2. Has you school seriously reviewed any of its foreign programs, centers, institutes or degree programs in the past two years? (1 point for a no.)

3. Does your school depend on adjuncts to teach mainline courses while offering small enrollment specialized courses taught by full time profs? (1 point for a yes)

4. Does your school have a high curve that is sometimes defended by not wanting to hurt the feelings of the students or other justifications that amount to “I do not want to actually have to evaluate someone?” (1 point for a yes)

5. Do colleagues propose programs that are needed even though they will not actually be teaching, traveling, or receiving a reduced teaching load if the program is adopted? (1 point for a no)

6. Can students graduate and take half or more of their classes on a pass/fail basis. (See question 4) (1 point for a yes)

7. Does your school encourage massive, barely supervised, externships that generate tuition dollars, provide free labor and, by the way, mean less teaching ? (1 point for a yes).

8. Does your administration mass mail glossy reports listing every conceivable thing faculty submit as reportable? (1 point for a yes).

9. Does your dean appear to be afraid to suggest that the School should do better and then hold people accountable? (1 point for a yes)

10. Is the norm that just about everyone is gone by 11 AM on Friday? (1 point for a yes)

If you scored a 10, it’s best to go into receivership and start from scratch.

If you are in the 7-9 range you will probably be a 10 soon.

If you are 4-6, I think you are average and a few hires could move you either way.

If you are 3 or less, congratulations.

Posted by Jeffrey Harrison at 04:15 PM | Comments (0)

Is Sorting Law School's Only Function?

Bainbridge and others are abuzz over Rush and Matsuo's paper, Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage? An Empirical Analysis of the Factors Which Were Related to Bar Examination Passage between 2001 and 2006 at a Midwestern Law School. The paper reports that simply taking "bar courses" generally does not improve performance on the Bar Exam.

The paper is clearly written but not (for me) surprising: it fits unpublished research I've seen, and common sense. I'd bet that a large minority of all law professors, and a majority of law professors hired since 1990, haven't sat for the Bar in the jurisdiction hosting their law school. It would be surprising if teaching behind this veil of ignorance could significantly improve test scores for marginal students. You can't teach to a test you haven't seen.

But if that's true, two questions come to mind. The first has been addressed by some commentators already, and boils down to: if not bar courses, what courses should law students take? Josh Wright responds: antitrust! Sam Kamin disagrees: professors you like! As for me, I offered the following comments in a package of diverse suggestions on this topic from my colleagues distributed to our first year students at the end of the Spring term:

I recommend that you select courses that are challenging and intrinsically interesting. This means tailoring course selection to your abilities (take a tax course, especially if you are afraid of math); and interests (recall what made you excited about the Law before coming here). The data I have seen do not correlate Bar passage with any particular package of courses, but rather with your overall performance and work ethic. Certain employers may expect to see foundational courses like corporations and evidence on your transcript, but I believe those expectations are the exception rather than the rule. The bottom line: take classes that will make you want to come to school in the morning.

Maybe such advice is helpful, maybe not. But regardless, it doesn't answer the big (second) question, which is this: is there a point to law school beyond sorting students?

The question shouldn't be read to understate the value of sorting. A little-discussed implication of Rush and Matsuo's research is that bar passage turns almost exclusively on how well the bottom half of a law school's class performs. In law schools with "high curves", such bottom dwellers probably aren't signaled that they are in trouble. They know they are relatively worse than their fellows, but they are getting B-minuses, which don't hurt enough to change study habits. Thus, a good technique for increasing bar passage is to sort students using a very low curve, target low performers, and remediate them. This takes lots of work, and may reduce a faculty's scholarly production. But it is worth it, because a law school that doesn't graduate students who can pass the bar is a very bad value proposition. And for what it is worth, Rush and Matsuo's findings provide some support for law professors who may be otherwise worried that law school grading is random. In the aggregate, it isn't, or at least it is just as good as Bar Exam grading.

But ranking can't be the only purpose of law school (even if it sometimes feels that way from students' perspectives). As the Sorting Hat sang in The Order of the Phoenix:

And now the Sorting Hat is here
and you all know the score:
I sort you into Houses
because that is what I'm for.
But this year I'll go further,
listen closely to my song:
though condemned I am to split you
still I worry that it's wrong,
though I must fulfill my duty
and must quarter every year
still I wonder whether sorting
may not bring the end I fear.
Oh, know the perils, read the signs,
the warning history shows,
for our Hogwarts is in danger
from external, deadly foes
and we must unite inside her
or we'll crumble from within
I have told you, I have warned you...
let the Sorting now begin

All of which is to say: a law school that does no more than rank students and get them jobs is missing a justifying mission, which (I think) makes it hard to support. Thus, the Moneylaw advice to Dean Chemerinsky articulated here doesn't fully satisfy me, even it is tactically wise.

(Image Source: The Hogwart's Sorting Hat Toy)

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 03:12 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Law School Ranking: Measurement vs. Characterization

I have long been concerned about negative externalities from ranking systems. Perhaps people and institutions are always prone to try to distinguish themselves. If so, Brian Leiter's expert consultation for the MacLean's rankings of Canadian law schools may be a good thing, since, as he states, it resulted in "a ranking system that can not be gamed, that does not depend on self-reported data, and is not an indecipherable stew of a dozen different ingredients."

However, Benjamin Alarie at Toronto has critiqued Leiter's efforts. Here are a few issues:

One of the central problems with how Faculty quality is measured is that it doesn’t assess influence in publications aside from 33 Canadian law journals. As an initial matter, I think it is fair to say that academics seek to publish in places with the most active audiences for particular types of research—for example, the best journals to publish law and economics research in are likely to be American peer reviewed journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies, or the American Law and Economics Review, or even professional economics journals.

[I]t is unlikely that frequency of citation is a perfect proxy for quality; for example, overly provocative papers are sometimes cited for being so provocative.

It is unclear what the threshold used was for including the firms as among the “elite firms” used by Maclean’s.

[A national reach] measure . . . misses "international reach" of the law schools that regularly place students in the excluded top New York and Boston firms, in international NGOs, and in various other attractive positions.

[By the way, I put the links into those block quotes above.]

I think these are all valid points, but the problem is even larger. The consumers of these rankings are, by and large, students looking for a good education and firms looking for well-trained lawyers. Why so much focus on whether the law schools are feeders for "top" firms? Perhaps the best law teaching is that which manages to train people for diverse careers in law.

Finally, a more philosophical point.

I fear that a misguided quest for objectivity can lead us to present many judgments that ought to be characterizations as, instead, measurements or rankings. Leiter deserves great credit for not trying to mash an incommensurable array of statistics into a single figure. But I still think true accuracy in law school assessment might be better found in words, not numbers--in a long-form assessment of the school's service to students, to the academy, and to its community. Perhaps such an evaluation would take a few hundred pages to cover all of Canada's law schools. But if someone about to embark on a career in law is not willing to try to make sense of such a document, perhaps they should not be a lawyer in the first place.

Obviously such long-form documents would not achieve the concision of a ranking system. As someone who's decried information overload, I see rankings' appeal. But I also recall a favorite saying of Hilary Putnam on approaches to epistemology: "any theory that fits in a nutshell belongs there." Perhaps the same can be said of rankings. There are some virtues to "knowing" less.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 09:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Law (Professor) Blog Ranking

[UPDATES IN RED] With the assistance of our intern, Sam Yospe, I decided to update the law blog ranking project first completed by Roger Alford at Opinio Juris. The following list ranks 41 law professor blogs according to traffic (as calculated by The Truth Laid Bear). To minimize distortion, we applied average monthly data, and ran the measurements about two weeks ago. This list only includes blogs that have at least one law professor as a regular blogger, and we exclude blogs that focus entirely on politics or current events, and blogs that are not tracked by Truth Laid Bear. Some blogs, like Patently-O, appear to be tracked only inconsistently by TLB and are not included in this list for the time being.

While this list ranks blogs by traffic, we have also included Truth Laid Bear's own weighted rankings. TLB ranks blogs using an algorithm that accounts for a "link score," a measure of how often blogs are linked to by other blogs. While the ranking by traffic that appears below and TLB's ranking are related, the correlation appears to be statistically insigificant. For example, Bainbridge 's blog is ranked second by TLB amongst legal blogs. Yet, by traffic it ranks ninth. Conversely, Sentencing Law and Policy is the ranked third amongst all legal blogs in traffic, yet it ranked 2,164 by TLB, a lower ranking than some legal blogs that receive less traffic.

These data suggest that there is significant heterogeneity in the audience of legal blogs, as some blogs seem to have wide audiences of readers not shared by others, and (indeed) exist in entirely different communal spaces. This fractured audience finding challenges my flat traffic thesis. Importantly, this post does not intend to suggest a thing about the relative quality of the blogs ranked, nor those that are not mentioned. This isn't even a popularity contest.

Blog	Hits	Rank
Volokh Conspiracy	23,084	18
Althouse	12,204	153
Sentencing Law and Policy	4,066	2,164
Balkinization	3,727	781
Tax Prof Blog	3,619	3,298
Concurring Opinions	2,737	2,708
Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports	1,826	9,823
BlackProf	1,794	4,704
Prawfsblawg	1,785	2,799
Professor Bainbridge	1,683	94
Sports Law Blog	1,107	5,548
Discourse.net	1,062	2,875
White Collar Crime Prof	1,013	9,034
Conglomerate	871	3,268
Opinio Juris	839	16,066
Is That Legal?	699	2,770
WorkPlace Prof	673	9,972
Chicago Law Faculty Blog	619	5,991
The Right Coast	565	10,784
IdeoBlog	534	6,552
CrimProf Blog	512	8,857
ImmigrationProf Blog	453	8,142
Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof	445	25,058
Election Law	389	4,586
MoneyLaw	351	12,955
Jurisdynamics	349	12,943
Ratio Juris	348	33,169
Empirical Legal Studies Blog	323	2,224
Religion Clause	298	10,274
Contracts Prof	294	20,849
Family Law Prof	294	28,835
Legal History Blog	271	16,579
Legal Profession Blog	233	17,391
Int’l Law and Economics Policy Blog	200	24,350
Sex Crimes	199	12,459
Truth on the Market	192	10,114
CrimLaw	159	6,155
PropertyProf	148	23,140
Madisonian	143	9,969
Antitrust Review	131	19,096
Mauled Again	100	13,057

Interested in playing with the data? Download the file. Again, this post is was created with the really great help of Sam Yospe. Thanks, Sam!

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 01:21 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Can Lawyers Afford Not to Play the Rankings Game?

In an article in National Jurist, rankings expert Brian Leiter was quoted as saying that "The more info and the more competing measures there are out there, the less concerned law schools will be about pleasing their U.S. News master." In a different setting, I too have been enamored of a diversity of rankings. I've also hoped that law schools would more formally recognize, say, their top 10% of brief-writers, researchers, or oral advocates, elevating the visibility of those with exceptional skills in areas outside of exam-taking.

However, Leigh Jones reports that there are some costs associated with a diversity of rankings:

By some estimates, law firms have about 200 chances each year to participate in rankings, awards programs or so-called "league table" publications that they hope will distinguish them from the competition. Not only are firms finding their marketing resources stretched thin by the onslaught, but they also say it is getting tougher to wade through the rubbish. "Not a day goes by that I don't come across another one from someone I've just never heard of," said Lloyd Pearson at White & Case.

Pearson is the "communications manager at the 1,907-attorney firm," and "was brought aboard last year to handle the flood of surveys, questionnaires, phone calls and research related to awards and rankings that the firm pursues each year." What happens to firms who can't hire someone to manage the information overload?

Unfortunately, avoiding the rat race may not be much of an option. As law schools learned to their chagrin, an "echo chamber" effect can cause early ratings to become self-reinforcing. This dynamic sheds new light on lawsuits against websites that purport to rank or score lawyers. Plaintiffs may rightly worry that a low initial rating will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, handicapping their chances at getting good cases and thereby pushing them further down the pecking order.

Hat Tip: Eric Goldman.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 07:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Are Alternative Law School Rankings Any Better than US News?

The WSJ has an article on alternative law school rankings to the infamous US News rankings. According to the article: "In the last two years, at least a dozen upstart Web sites, academic papers and blogs have stepped in with surveys of their own to feed the hunger for information on everything from the quality of the faculty to what a school's diploma might be worth to future employers." It has this chart of some alternative rankings of law schools:

In my opinion, all of these rankings have serious flaws.

US News -- The reputation surveys are only given to deans and just one or two faculty members (a very unrepresentative sample of faculty). The reputation surveys are too easy to game. And the reputation scores of 1 through 5 are not granular enough. For example, Yale has an academic reputation score of 4.9, Harvard 4.8, and Stanford 4.7. That means that people in the surveys are rating these schools with 4s or less. Who gives less than a 5 to any of these schools on a 1-5 scale? Some of the other numbers factored into the US News equation are quite silly and can be easily cooked, with schools using accounting tricks that would make Enron officials blush.

Supreme Court Clerkship Placement -- This is a ridiculous way to rank schools. Getting a Supreme Court clerkship is like winning the lottery. There are far too many qualified people than positions, and getting a position certainly takes merit but it also takes a lot of luck. Part of it depends upon the connections of a school's professors, who can place clerks with feeder judges or may even have influence with a Supreme Court Justice. Nobody seriously goes to law school planning on getting a Supreme Court clerkship. And it's based on total number of clerks, so the ranking in the WSJ column is meaningless since some schools are much larger than others (Harvard is more than twice the size of Yale).

Elite Law Firm Placement -- This is better than Supreme Court clerkship placement, but still quite flawed. It assumes that going to an elite law firm is the premiere job in the law. But what about government jobs? AUSAs? Judicial clerkships? Academia? Public interest? Ranking based on elite law firm placement will create terrible incentives for law schools to steer students into big law firms when this may not be what particular students really want to do with their lives.

Law Journal Citations -- This is just silly. I don't see any connection between how many times articles in a school's journal receive citations and a school's academic reputation.

SSRN Downloads -- Another problematic metric. SSRN downloads only measure a paper's popularity with Internet communities. They don't measure a paper's quality. High download counts are skewed toward schools with larger faculties, and to papers by professors who blog or who write about economics or technology issues. I wish I could be more sanguine about SSRN downloads as a ranking mechanism, for GW, the law school where I teach, ranks in the top 10.

Leiter's Rankings -- In this version of his ranking system, Leiter ranks schools by per capita citations to faculty scholarship. Leiter himself recognizes some of the problems with citation counts as a metric of quality, so he understands the flaws in his system. Citations are better than SSRN downloads, but they are still deeply flawed and even in an ideal world only capture a faculty's scholarly reputation, which is a very important component of a law school's quality, but there are other factors as well: quality of the student body, resources, teaching, job placement, etc.

So how are we to rank law schools? If all these methods are flawed, what is the ideal method? If the US News equation is silly, what factors should be considered and how much should they be weighed?

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 04:37 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Is This The Beginning of the End for U.S. News Undergrad Rankings, and Will Law School Rankings Survive the Collapse?

The New York Times reports today that the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have agreed to stop participating in U.S. News’ college rankings survey. According to the report, the Annapolis Group, an association of liberal arts colleges, released a statement that a majority of the 80 college presidents attending its annual meeting had declared their intent not to participate in the U.S. News rankings. The move follows on the heels of similar efforts by college presidents earlier this year, and of a widely-publicized critique of the rankings system last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Has the liberal arts world finally decided that enough is enough? The Times quotes Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College: “Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them? … [T]his is not our project.” Of course, the jury is still out on whether the liberal arts colleges’ nascent rebellion will have legs. Not surprisingly, some schools at the top of the food chain – e.g., #2 Amherst – plan to continue to cooperate with U.S. News, and want further “discussion” of the issue. Still, this latest move by liberal arts colleges seems to be more than mere window dressing.

All of this has me wondering: If U.S. News loses its undergrad rankings cash cow, will the law school rankings be far behind? Or might the law school rankings survive, even if the undergrad rankings collapse? Put differently, are there reasons why the law school world will (and perhaps should) continue to “do U.S. News’ work for them”?

I can think of a couple of reasons why law school rankings might survive, despite the collapse of undergrad rankings.

First, perhaps rankings “work” in the law school context – perhaps they’re more appropriate and more useful than in the liberal arts context. After all, law students and liberal arts students are very different kinds of consumers: Most liberal arts students are looking for a particular kind of “experience,” and the varying “experiences” that liberal arts institutions offer are just not something that U.S. News-style rankings can adequately capture. But like it or not, most law school students aren’t looking for an “experience” – they’re looking for a job. As consumers, they look for the product (i.e., legal education) most likely to produce the largest number of high-quality job opportunities. And perhaps that is something that some kind of rankings system can capture, even if U.S. News’ particular version does a bad job of it.

Second, I suspect that law school deans and most law professors are simply less troubled by the rankings system than are our liberal arts counterparts – a fact that can be explained by the very different academic cultures that we inhabit. The legal profession itself attracts Type A, competitive personalities -- and the vast majority of law school deans (and many, if not most, law professors) are certainly no exception. At a minimum, U.S. News offers an outlet for competition – and it is not surprising that the Type A personalities who inhabit legal academia might find that competition (as inane and meaningless as it often seems to be) appealing on some level. Simply put, legal academics may well be more comfortable working in an environment where rankings play a key role; many of us may even thrive in such a competitive environment. At a minimum, we’re less likely to have the instinctive allergic reaction to rankings that so many liberal arts types seem to have.

As a normative matter, I don’t really find these arguments convincing. Personally, I find the U.S. News rankings – and our obsession with them -- to be silly and distracting, and I wish that law schools would follow our liberal arts counterparts’ example and simply refuse to continue to “do U.S. News’ work for them.”

But as a practical matter, I’m also betting that U.S. News will be able to milk its law school cash cow for a good while longer, regardless of what happens with the liberal arts rankings. To date, efforts to mount a law school rebellion against U.S. News have been weak, at best. Bottom line: If and when U.S. News goes down, it won’t be the law schools leading the charge – it will be phalanxes of angry English professors.

Posted by Melissa Waters at 04:07 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

May SSRN Download Counts

From the Department of Possibly Misleading Information comes the Law School SSRN Rankings for May. See previous installments here and here. I originally highlighted in blue schools that significantly outperformed my impression of their popularly conceived rank; and in red those that underperformed. But then I reconsidered and concluded that this was an unproductive exercise. So I am presenting these data without further interpretation.

By Total Downloads

1 Harvard University - Harvard Law School 209695
2 University of Chicago - Law School 188088
3 Columbia University - Columbia Law School 149467
4 Stanford Law School 136852
5 University of Texas at Austin - School of Law 124802
6 University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law 114838
7 Yale University - Law School 111644
8 Georgetown University - Law Center 103398
9 George Washington University - Law School 91441
10 University of California, Berkeley - School of Law (Boalt Hall) 81539
11 University of Southern California - Law School 80660
12 University of Illinois - College of Law 79954
13 Vanderbilt University - School of Law 79510
14 New York University - School of Law 74137
15 University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - School of Law 70470
16 University of Pennsylvania Law School 62323
17 Duke University - School of Law 50452
18 University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Law School 49161
19 Emory University - School of Law 48911
20 George Mason University - School of Law 46048
21 University of San Diego - School of Law 45385
22 University of Virginia - School of Law 42921
23 Boston University - School of Law 35095
24 Ohio State University - Michael E. Moritz College of Law 34651
25 Northwestern University - School of Law 34541
26 Boston College - Law School 33519
27 Florida State University - College of Law 32810
28 Yeshiva University - Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law 30092
29 Cornell University - School of Law 29511
30 Fordham University - School of Law 28711
31 Loyola Law School - Los Angeles 25838
32 Michigan State University - College of Law 25441
33 Temple University - James E. Beasley School of Law 17913
34 Washington University, St. Louis - School of Law 17536
35 New York Law School 17094
36 Case Western Reserve University - School of Law 16896
37 Indiana University School of Law - Bloomington 16583
38 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - School of Law-Camden 14568
39 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - School of Law 14084
40 Washington and Lee University - School of Law 13188
41 University of Maryland - School of Law 12471
42 University of Colorado Law School 12403
43 Notre Dame Law School 12216
44 Brooklyn Law School 12096
45 University of Tennessee, Knoxville - College of Law 11952
46 University of Cincinnati - College of Law 11671
47 University of Iowa - College of Law 11637
48 University of California, Davis - School of Law 11310
49 University of Arizona - James E. Rogers College of Law 11202
50 University of Wisconsin - Law School 11106

By New Downloads

1 Harvard University - Harvard Law School 54973
2 Columbia University - Columbia Law School 37347
3 University of Texas at Austin - School of Law 31518
4 University of Chicago - Law School 31342
5 University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law 27884
6 Stanfor