Law school rankings in the United States

Main article: College and university rankings

Law School Rankings are a specific subset of College and university rankings deal specifically with law schools. Like college and university rankings, Law School Rankings can be based on subjectively perceived "quality," on some combination of empirical statistics, or on surveys of educators, scholars, students, prospective students, or others. Such rankings are often consulted by prospective students as they choose which schools they will apply to or which school they will attend.

The most popular ranking of Law Schools is the annual Top Graduate Schools version from US News & World Reports magazine. Beyond this popular and mainstream list, there are numerous other rankings of law schools, which include:

• Cooley Rankings
• Gourman Report
• Hylton Rankings
• Law School 100
• Leiter Rankings

Criticisms of rankings

The American Bar Association, or ABA, has consistently refused to support or participate in law school rankings. Likewise, the Law School Admission Council has similarly shown opposition to rankings. The Association of American Law Schools has also voiced complaints; their executive director Carl Monk went so far as to say "these rankings are a misleading and deceptive, profit-generating commercial enterprise that compromises U.S. News and World Report's journalistic integrity." Among the criticisms of law school rankings is that they are arbitrary in the characteristics they measure and the value given to each one. Another complaint is that a prospective law student should take into account the "fit" and appropriateness of each school himself, and that there is thus not a "one size fits all" ranking. Others complain that common rankings shortchange schools due to geographical or demographic reasons. One critic has gone so far as to create a website that sarcastically ranks US magazines. US News is placed alone in the "Third Tier."

As a response to the prevalence of law school rankings, the ABA and the LSAC publish an annual law school guide. This guide, which does not seek to rank or sort law schools by any criteria, instead seeks to provide the reader with a set of standard, important data on which to judge law schools. It contains information on all 190 ABA-Approved Law Schools. This reference, called The Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schoolsis provided free online and also in print for a small cost. A similar guide for Canadian Law Schools is also published by the Law School Admission Council and is called Official Guide to Canadian Law Schools. These guides seek to serve as an alternative to the US News Rankings and law school rankings in general.

Additionally, the American Bar Association issued the MacCrate Report in 1992, which outlined many fundamental problems with modern legal education and called for reform in American law schools. While the report was hailed as a "template for modern legal education", its practice-oriented tenets have met resistance by law schools continually ranked in the "top 14."

US News has not allowed these criticisms to go unanswered. They regularly outline and justify their methodology alongside the rankings, and have even published defenses of their value. Additionally, law professors William Henderson and Andrew Morriss have come out with a study criticizing law schools' (and the ABA's) refusal to adopt any better objective comparison method for the continued widespread reliance on U.S. News. Henderson and Morriss allege that law schools' attempts to "game" their U.S. News ranking by manipulating postgraduation employment statistics or applicant selectivity have led U.S. News to adjust its methodology accordingly, resulting in a counter-productive cycle. They go on to suggest that the ABA should use its accreditation power to mandate greater transparency in law schools' statistical reporting.

Impact of rankings

Despite these criticisms, Law School Rankings in general and those by US News in particular play a very dramatic role in the world of legal education. When a school's ranking drops, fewer admitted applicants accept spots at the school, and people may get fired. Likewise, when a school rises in the rankings, the school often accidentally overenrolls. This pressure has also resulted in various schools "gaming the rankings." Some law schools reject applicants whose high LSAT scores indicate that they'll probably go elsewhere anyway, in order to appear more selective. Other schools, in an attempt to increase the amount of money spent per student, increase tuition and return it to the students as financial aid.

Law School Rankings carry more importance compared to those of other professional schools in their respective fields. This is in large part due to the nature of the United States' legal market. Whereas the average salary of an MD (or other occupations, including engineers and accountants) from a mid-tier institution is typically near that of MDs (and engineers or accountants) counterparts from more elite institutions, the disparity between the average salary for a graduate of a highly-ranked law school and a mid-tier law school can be quite large.

Rankings by U.S. News and World Report

As is noted above, the most recognized rankings are those by US News and World Report. The Law School Rankings are organized into three main sections: The first is a "Top 100" that lists the top hundred schools in order from highest ranked to lowest ranked. After that, US News groups the remaining 80 accredited law schools into two roughly unranked groups called "Third Tier" and "Fourth Tier" (note that the Top 100 includes both the first and second "tier").

Methodology

Each school is assigned an overall rank, which is normalized so that it is out of 100. This rank takes into account Quality Assessment (measured by opinion surveys), Selectivity (measured by incoming student profiles and the acceptance rate), Placement Success (measured by bar passage and employment rates), Faculty Resources (measured by expenditures, library volumes, and student/faculty ratio). The magazine gives 40 percent to reputation, 25 percent to selectivity, 20 percent to placement success and 15 percent to faculty resources, thus combining these factors into an overall score.

Specialized U.S. News Rankings

The annual issue also includes special rankings of specific programs, including Clinical Training and Dispute Resolution. These are based more on opinion surveys.

Consistency at the top of the U.S. News Rankings

Although the US News has published an annual version of the rankings since 1989, there has been remarkable consistency at the top of the US News Rankings. Yale has been ranked first every single year. Additionally, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia have always appeared in the top five.

Some have argued the consistent placement of these schools at the top has simply reinforced their position, leading to a "feedback loop" because of the heavy reliance by US News on opinion surveys.

There are exactly fourteen schools that have ever earned a top ten spot. These schools, listed below, have seen their ranking within the top fourteen spots shift frequently, but have not placed outside of the top fourteen since the inception of the annual rankings. Because of their variable placement within the top ten, but remarkable consistency of these fourteen schools at the top of all 180+ schools, they are occasionally referred to collectively as the "Top Fourteen" in published books on Law School Admissions, undergraduate university pre-law advisers , professional law school consultants, and newspaper articles on the subject. Facetiously, they are also referred to as the "Top Ten".

Schools that consistently rank in the top 14

The "Top Fourteen" schools according to US News and World Report Rankings are (in alphabetical order):

• Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, CA.
• Columbia Law School, Columbia University, in New York, NY.
• Cornell Law School, Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY.
• Duke University School of Law, Duke University, in Durham, NC.
• Georgetown University Law Center, Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.
• Harvard Law School, Harvard University, in Cambridge, MA.
• New York University School of Law, New York University, in New York, NY.
• Northwestern University School of Law, Northwestern University, in Chicago, IL.
• Stanford Law School, Stanford University, in Stanford, CA.
• University of Chicago Law School, University of Chicago, in Chicago, IL.
• University of Michigan Law School, University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, MI.
• University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, PA.
• University of Virginia School of Law, University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, VA.
• Yale Law School, Yale University, in New Haven, CT.

Characteristics of the top schools in the U.S. News Rankings

There exist common characteristics across these top schools. All current members serving on the Supreme Court graduated from one of these top schools, and every Ivy League law school (Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, and Yale) is represented here. Reputation is also a key driver of their placement, according to Anna Ivey, noted law school admissions counselor, who declared that "A degree from a top-14 school will be portable nationally" in a Washington Post interview.

Alternatives to the U.S. News Rankings

There are a number of alternative Law School Rankings that have been prepared, often in response to those by US News. The Internet Legal Research Group has compiled links and background on many of these rankings at their website.

Cooley rankings

The Cooley rankings are sometimes called the Brennan rankings, in reference to the President of Cooley Law School who is involved in their creation. Thomas M. Cooley Law School - a school consistently placed in the fourth tier by US News, and ranked 178 out of 180 in the Hylton ranking - struck back by creating its own set of rankings. The first edition of these rankings, called "Judging the Law Schools" was published in 1996 by Thomas E. Brennan, Sr., founder and president of the Cooley Law School. This online publication, now in its seventh edition, measures things such as library square footage, library open hours and number of minority students, among dozens of other measures. It is available on Cooley's website. Brian Leiter, who shares a very common belief on the Cooley rankings, calls their system "preposterous" by placing itself higher than schools such as Stanford and Berkeley's Boalt Hall.

Gourman Report

Dr. Jack Gourman is credited with being the first ranker of law schools. He is a professor at California State University-Northridge. The Gourman Report, a print book published by Princeton Review, ranks undergraduate and graduates schools. The last edition to include law school rankings was published in 1997. Among the criticisms particular to the Gourman Report rankings is that it favors large, public universities and the use of an opaque methodology that prevents the reader from careful analysis.

Hylton Rankings

Another new set of rankings, which has received attention recently, is the Hylton Rankings, prepared by Dr. J. Gordon Hylton of Marquette University's Law School. Hylton billed his rankings as US News data "without the clutter." The rankings consider only LSAT (converted median) and peer assessment (as measured by US News' survey of law professors). The much-discussed "top fourteen schools," though ordered differently, remain the same.

Law School 100

The Law School 100 refers to a website listing "America's Top Law Schools" from 1-100, supplemented with the remaining ABA-Approved schools listed alphabetically in a "second tier." This list is supposedly "based on qualitative, rather than quantitative, criteria." Despite this claim, however, the ad-riddled website hasn't been updated since 2004 and gives absolutely no description of its methodology or criteria. Given these shortcomings, these rankings have not achieved any degree of renown, popularity, or respect.

Leiter rankings

Brian Leiter, a law professor at University of Texas School of Law, has prepared a set of various rankings that he dubs Leiter's Law School Rankings. These various rankings judge schools on factors similar to those used by US News--like incoming student LSAT/GPA profiles--but also on faculty reputation and scholarly research. This, he notes, puts the focus "exclusively on the three factors central to a good legal education: the quality of the faculty, the quality of the student body, and the quality of teaching." Among the criticisms of the Leiter Rankings is that they include various lists of schools ranked by individual factors, but no attempt is made to create a combined or overall ranking.

External links

• US News Top 100 Law Schools
• Leiter Rankings
• Internet Legal Research Group's Index to Law School Rankings
• Ranking US News (A collection of various criticisms of the US News Law School Rankings)
• Law Review Articles (PDF) (A listing of various published articles on Law School Rankings, compiled by University of Texas-Austin Professor Brian Leiter)
• Law School Rankings Symposium (Website for national symposium on law school rankings, including copies of papers and abstracts).
• College Rankings: Caution and Controversy (Education and Social Science Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
• University Ranking and its Discontents (Article by V. Wish about the ongoing debate over the value of law school rankings).
• Law School Admissions Message Board: Discuss Law Schools and Admissions with Other Applicants and Students