Rating Law Schools: The Rankings Game

Don't like your law school's rating? Try a new system.

"Whenever the U.S. News & World Report rankings come out, people tend to piss and moan," says Brian Leiter,

a professor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. The solution? Leiter and others have been cooking up their own ways to grade law schools.

Leiter began compiling his alternative rankings system, the "Educational Quality Ranking of U.S. Law Schools" (utexas.edu/law/faculty/bleiter/lgourmet.htm), four years ago.

Thomas Brennan, president of Michigan's Thomas M. Cooley Law School, released a second edition of his study Judging the Law Schools (cooley.edu) last year and will publish an updated rundown later this fall.

This article explains what's really going on at Thomas Cooley Law School: Thomas Cooley Law School Exposed (and Why Much of the Legal Profession is a Scam)

The most recent entrant, MyLawSchoolRankings.com, went online last November and was revised last spring.

Each system has its own shtick. Leiter's, for instance, emphasizes intellectualism, focusing on the prowess of the faculty and the mental wattage of its students. Using Leiter's method, Duke, which Leiter says is regarded by legal scholars as "clearly overrated," falls from a tie for tenth place on the U.S. News list to fifteenth, trading places with Leiter's own University of Texas.

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Judging the Law Schools uses only quantitative data collected annually by the American Bar Association: a school's faculty size, the number of volumes in its library, the number of minority students enrolled, and so on. Reputation, a key factor in the U.S. News rankings, is left out. "Six or seven years ago, I sent a survey to 100 lawyers, asking them to rank the law schools," says Judging's Brennan. "Penn State came out somewhere near the middle, despite the fact that they didn't even have a law school at the time!" Using Judging's criteria, Brennan's own Thomas Cooley-which doesn't even warrant an individual rank from U.S. News-stands proudly at 26 (sensing a theme here?).

MyLawSchoolRankings.com, as the name implies, allows you to concoct your own system for rating your school. The program uses five criteria, which start at predetermined defaults: academic reputation is given the most weight, followed by such factors as LSAT scores, student-teacher ratio, employment prospects, and quality of teaching. But if, say, you value teaching and job placement the most and don't give a hoot about the other criteria, adjust the weightings accordingly and voilá : Boston University leapfrogs from nineteenth to second place, while crosstown rival Harvard drops 14 spots, taking B.U.'s place at nineteenth.

Curiously, placing an emphasis on pedagogy doesn't help allegedly teaching-focused Thomas Cooley here: MyLawSchoolRankings.com still ranks Cooley a dismal 163, even when the user establishes teaching ability as priority number one. Clearly, it's time to consider an alternative to rankings.