NEW - Judging the Law Schools 10th Edition Press Release

Judging the Law Schools Factors Defined

Other Factors to Compare Schools

The English nobility and the Indian caste system represent outdated notions of entitlement and reflect the evils of cultural discrimination. Indeed, Americans overthrew their former government largely because of the abuses of the self-perpetuating nobility that reserved for itself the privileges of participation in the English political and social systems. And Americans have replaced the caste system with equal protection under law. Americans inherently reject elitism and discrimination in favor of opportunity.

Except in education, where elitism still dominates.

Law schools allow themselves to be victimized by a pecking order based on elitism, which values scholarship over teaching, legal theory over practice preparation, faculty prerogatives over student services, and exclusion over access. How many law review articles are published in elite law reviews is more important to the faculty than how many students they help to learn the law and how many good lawyers they produce. Protecting faculty governance, academic freedom, and tenure is more important than working with student groups, assisting students with problems, and providing community service. And how many students are not admitted is more important than how well those who are admitted are taught the law and how to practice it.

Rankings produced by US News perpetuate the elitism rampant in the legal education culture. US News has created a four-tier caste system that even its victims use as a frame of reference. Elitism in its most insidious form is found in the so-called reputation survey of law schools among academics and “hiring partners,” most of whom are graduates of the elite schools and recognize only elite schools as worthy.

Among the suggestions to counter the pernicious influence of US News was one that proposed creating competing ranking systems, so that US News would become just one of many ranking systems. Indeed, one notion was that the data displayed in the ABA’s Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools be made accessible on a Web site that allowed a visitor to compare law schools according to any combination of the data the ABA already reports in on-line format.

We, of course, wholeheartedly agree with that suggestion, because it is precisely what we have been doing for several years and do again in this tenth edition of Judging the Law Schools using the data from the 2009 Official Guide. Six years ago, we put that information on Cooley’s Web site. Anyone wishing to do what these deans suggested can simply go to www.cooley.edu, and click on “Rankings.” There the visitor can compare schools by state, by individual schools, or by any combination of 32 factors, all taken directly from the ABA’s consumer information publication and presented by the ABA as important to students in making their law school selection.

We again offer some observations. Our rankings are subjective in that we assign value to each factor, such as ranking bigger libraries as better than smaller libraries. And we give each of the 32 factors equal weight, a decision intended to reduce the impact of any single factor on the overall rankings, which is the fundamental flaw in US News. Unfortunately, some bloggers have taken to demeaning our approach, offering criticisms that make it clear that they have read none of the explanatory material we offer and making comments that reinforce their commitment to elitism.

We do agree with US News in offering one caution. The data taken from the ABA reports is used by the ABA as submitted by the schools; no audits are performed by the ABA, and the schools are not held accountable for inaccuracies in the reports, which seem to be increasing.

Also, the ABA refuses to make public other data that it collects that would be exceptionally helpful to the public, consumers, and potential applicants. The need for confidentiality of this data is, at best, questionable, particularly since much of it is public information already, very little of it is proprietary, and some of it is information that was once released by the ABA as consumer information, but was eliminated from the public reports due to purported limited space in its publication. That hardly means the information about how large each school’s facilities are or how many hours of reference service each school provides could not be put on the ABA Web site for public viewing.

With the growth of the internet, search engines, and blogs, we continue to hope that the days of US News dominance are drawing to a close. We hope that Judging the Law Schools reduces the influence of the US News rankings, as well as the tendency toward elitism in legal education that the US News perpetuates. So long as the US News dominates the ratings, the use of the LSAT will continue to be a major roadblock to those whose dream is to have the opportunity to study law, particularly among some minority groups whose LSAT scores continue to be unaccountably lower than others. Sadly, so long as elitism dominates legal education, the US News in turn will reinforce elitism.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently released its report entitled “Educating Lawyers,” which concluded that the elite schools may have things wrong in preparing their graduates for the profession of law. Coupled with the American Bar Foundation reports on dissatisfaction among both elite firms and the graduates of the elite schools from which they hire, the premise that law school quality rests primarily on reputation has been seriously undermined. The self-perpetuating caste system should be replaced with an objective view that considers opportunity and academic rigor to be positives, that treats exclusion as a negative, and that values the production of good lawyers over the production of legal theorists.

Back to Top