NEW - 2007 Judging the Law Schools Press Release

Judging the Law Schools Factors Defined

Other Factors to Compare Schools

This past year saw the beginning of the inevitable revolt against the damage done to education by the rankings mania created by US News and World Report. The leaders of that revolt were not found among the law schools, but among the colleges and universities that suffer at the hands of this magazine.

That is not to say that the law schools are not increasingly disgruntled with the US News approach. They are. But they remain surprisingly unwilling to confront the US News. To a large degree, the law schools are afraid to bell the cat by refusing to submit data to US News, risking the consequence that US News will make up (“estimate”) the missing data. And, we suspect, many of them are reluctant to take on this approach as a matter of principle, because they like to tout their position in the rankings, both on the overall list and within the specialty areas where they are recognized. Ending the practice of promoting lofty US News rankings, which is confirmed by a tour of law school Web sites and by a review of their literature, would require considerable courage.

Among the suggestions that received significant play 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 ninth edition of Judging the Law Schools. Five 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.

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.

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 relates to the sort of information that was once released by the ABA as consumer information but was cut due to 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, the days of US News dominance are drawing to a close. We hope that Judging the Law Schools hastens the demise of the pernicious effect 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.

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 and treats exclusion as a negative.

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