I agree with much of the advice that co-blogger David Bernstein offers on law school rankings and admissions. I don’t think that the US News rankings are completely useless, but their utility is indeed limited by various methodological weaknesses, such as those that I pointed out here and here. The most fundamental problem is that the rankings are primarily based on surveys of academics, lawyers, and judges who have no idea of what goes on at most of the schools they rank:
A substantial part (25%) of a school’s ranking depends on ratings by randomly selected professors at other schools. Another 15% is based on a survey of randomly selected lawyers and judges.
Here’s the problem: there are some 190 ABA-accredited law schools in the US. The average professor doesn’t know much about what is going on at the vast majority of them. If I spent my time keeping up with the faculty publications, curricula, student quality, and so forth, at the other 190 law schools, I wouldn’t have any time left over to do my own research and teaching….. I suspect that the same is true of the lawyers and judges. They too have their own work to do, and therefore can’t spend their time keeping track of the doings at dozens of law schools.
David is also right to suggest that a school’s average LSAT score is the best shorthand measure of its quality. It’s the students who have the biggest impact on the schools’ reputation with employers. If you want a useful measure of faculty quality, check out Brian Leiter’s ranking. Leiter rates scholarship, which is not the same thing as teaching. Some excellent scholars are terrible teachers. On average, however, good scholars are likely to be better teachers than mediocre ones, in part because they know their subject better. Moreover, a professor’s scholarship is generally the most important indicator of his influence in his field, which in turn impacts his ability to help students get ahead in that specialty.
Like David, I sometimes get questions from people who want to go to law school in order to work in some particular field. As a constitutional law professor, I often get queries from people who want to practice “constitutional law.” When I get such a question, I always start out by asking what the student means. “Constitutional law” covers so many different issues that it’s impossible for anyone to be an expert on all of them. Most lawyers specialize.
The good news is that there are many law jobs where constitutional law comes into play on a regular basis. If you are a criminal lawyer, you will probably often run into Fourth Amendment issues. If you represent a newspaper or TV station, you will often get First Amendment issues. So if your goal is simply to work in a practice area where you regularly deal with constitutional law cases, there are many options to choose from. Just pick the area of constitutional law that interests you and find out which industries, criminal defense practices, or government agencies routinely litigate cases in that field.
If, however, you want to work on cutting edge constitutional law cases that set major new precedents, your options are much more limited. Some public interest firms such as the ACLU or the Institute for Justice do indeed litigate cases like that regularly. So do a few major specialized appellate firms, many of them in Washington, DC. But if you want to get a job with any of these organizations right after law school, you probably have to attend one of the most prestigious thirty or forty schools (here, the US New rankings are a relatively good proxy) and do very well there, usually in the top 10-15% of your class or better. It also helps to do a clerkship with a federal appellate court. If you don’t have those credentials, you can still work your way into a top public interest or appellate job by becoming a successful litigator elsewhere and then lateraling. But it won’t be easy, since lots of other capable people want to do the same thing.
Like cutting-edge constitutional law, international law (mentioned by David), is also a highly competitive field. As he notes, you are unlikely to get a job in it if you don’t speak a foreign language and aren’t a graduate of a top law school. But all is not lost. If you are monolingual, you can fix that problem by studying foreign languages! In most major cities, reasonably priced night school language courses are readily available. I’m learning Spanish that way right now. The foreign languages you learn will probably be valuable even if you don’t end up becoming an international law practitioner; I’m not one myself, but my knowledge of Russian and French has still helped me a lot in various ways. While in law school, you should also take courses on the law and politics of whatever part of the world you want to focus on in your future international law work.
Finally, international law, like constitutional law, is a large and diverse field. Before trying to get into it, you should have some idea as to what type of international law you want to do. For example, there are far more opportunities in international commercial law than in more widely publicized areas such as international human rights law.