Law school rankings are a specific subset of college and university rankings dealing specifically with law schools. Like college and university rankings, law school rankings can be based on empirical data, subjectively-perceived qualitative data (often survey research of educators, law professors, lawyers, students, or others), or some combination of these.
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 U.S. News & World Report "Top Graduate Schools" listing, where Yale Law School has ranked first every year.[1] Beyond this popular list, there are numerous other law school rankings:
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The American Bar Association (ABA), has consistently refused to support or participate in law school rankings.[2][3] Likewise, the Law School Admission Council has shown opposition to rankings.[4] 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."[5] 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.[6] 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 200 ABA-Approved Law Schools. This reference, called The Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools is 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.[7] 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."[8]
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.[9] 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.[10] 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.[10] They go on to suggest that the ABA should use its accreditation power to mandate greater transparency in law schools' statistical reporting.[10]
In March 2011, Loyola Law School Dean Victor Gold penned an op-ed in the Huffington Post, accusing U.S. News & World Report of "refus[ing] to consider diversity as a factor in its ranking system."[11] Gold asserted that "[t]here is a broad consensus among law school deans and professors that diversity enriches law school education." Loyola, which has a large Asian student body, claims 37% of its students are "minorities," but it does not provide any specifics.
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.[12] Likewise, when a school rises in the rankings, the school often accidentally over-enrolls. This pressure has also resulted in various schools "gaming the rankings."[13] In a March 2003 article in Student Lawyer, Jane Easter Bahls stated that, in order to appear more selective, some law schools reject applicants whose high LSAT scores indicate that they probably would go somewhere else.[14] 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.[14]
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".
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.[15]
The annual issue also includes special rankings of specific programs, including Clinical Training and Dispute Resolution. These are based more on opinion surveys.
Although US News has published an annual version of the rankings since 1987 with the exception of 1988-89, there has been remarkable consistency at the top of the US News Rankings. Yale Law School has been ranked first every single year. Additionally, Harvard, Columbia and Stanford 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 exists an informal category known as the top 14, or T14. 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 with the exception of Cornell trading places with UCLA during the inaugural rankings in 1987.[16] Because of their variable placement within the top fourteen, 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,[17] undergraduate university pre-law advisers,[18] professional law school consultants, and newspaper articles on the subject.[19]
The schools that have consistently ranked in the "Top Fourteen" since the inception of the rankings are (in alphabetical order, ignoring terms denoting the type of school, such as "University"):[20]
Note that Georgetown and UT Austin tied for 14th in 2011 rankings.[21]
There exist common characteristics across these top schools. Reputation is a key driver of their placement, according to Anna Ivey, noted law school admissions counselor, who declared, "A degree from a top-14 school will be portable nationally" in a Washington Post interview.[22] Nonetheless, there are schools outside of the top 14 whose graduates predominantly place nationally rather than locally.[23]
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 its website.
Judging the Law School Rankings are sometimes called the Brennan rankings or the Cooley rankings, in reference to the President of Cooley Law School who was involved in their creation. Thomas M. Cooley Law School - a school consistently placed in the fourth tier by US News - created its own set of rankings. The first edition of these rankings, called "Judging the Law Schools" was published in 1996 by Thomas E. Brennan, founder and president of the Cooley Law School.[24] This online publication, now in its tenth edition, measures only ABA data such as first time bar passage rates, LSAT scores, academic facilities, student and faculty diversity, as well as twenty other objective measures. It is available on the Cooley Law School website.[25] Academic Brian Leiter calls their system, which does not poll perceived reputation and places Cooley Law School higher than schools such as Stanford and Berkeley, "preposterous."[26]
The ranking system advocated by the school has come under criticism for the methodology used to determine placement.[27] The school maintains that judging a legal education by what caliber of students enter will not adequately address the quality of lawyers which come out. However, the Cooley ranking system has been criticized for never actually mathematically addressing this issue.[28] Instead, a host of less relevant criteria, like volumes in library, were introduced to offset the UGPA and LSAT indicators. In the tenth edition of the Cooley ranking system, Cooley Law ranks themselves 12th in the United States ahead of law schools such as Stanford Law School, University of Michigan Law School, and Duke University School of Law.
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 are that the school rankings in each subcategory (administration, faculty, library, alumni, etc.) are identical to the overall rankings, it favors large, public universities and the use of an opaque methodology that prevents the reader from careful analysis.[29]
Another set of rankings 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.[30]
Brian Leiter, a law professor at University of Chicago School of Law, has prepared a set of various rankings that he dubs Leiter's Law School Rankings.[31] These various rankings judge schools on factors similar to those used by US News, such as incoming student LSAT/GPA profiles, and 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 reflect certain biases of the other by including various lists of schools ranked by individual factors with no attempt to create an overall ranking that cumulatively takes into account all relevant factors.[32]
The career information and survey site Vault.com released its first set of law school rankings in 2008.[33] Based solely on the surveys of nearly 400 hiring partners and recruiting professionals from across the United States, the rankings reflect how survey participants rated incoming associates on their research and writing skills, knowledge of legal doctrine, possession of other relevant knowledge (e.g., science for IP lawyers), and ability to manage a calendar and work with an assistant. Without turning directly to statistics or educational quality, the Vault rankings attempt to quantify which schools produce the most marketable graduates in the private sector. As of 2008, only the law schools with the top 25 cumulative scores received recognition.