The Volokh Conspiracy

Penn and Chicago are tied?

I think Penn spends more money on landscaping and has a more expensive West/Lexis contracts, tie broken.

Also, the list isn't numbered right. I think there's a hoax here.

I think he's referring to the skips. They just reflect ties in the rankings. I.e., when two schools are tied for #2, then the next one is ranked fourth, not third.

"Rule 6: There is no Rule 6!"

there's a tie for 2 then a jump to 4, but a tie for 14 and no jump to 16.

My point is that the thinking it "must" include any school is inaccurate, and that Georgetown has always lagged the other schools on the list.

Professor Kerr has committed a critical typo here: UCLA is NOT tied with Georgetown for 14, it's at 15 (GULC has a 72, UCLA a 71). Therefore the T14 remains thankfully unbreached by lower-tiered law schools.

[OK Comments: Thanks for catching that, T14Student. Just corrected.]

"Therefore the T14 remains thankfully unbreached by lower-tiered law schools."

This is what I was getting at.

These rankings have about as much validity as the early season rankings of college football teams - they're entirely speculative. Of course, with academic departments there's no mechanism for deciding who beats whom like you have with football.

Imagine if football was decided this way - the teams were ranked, but nobody ever played any games. I'll bet Harvard and Yale would still be #1 and #2.

I would be interested in whether liberal schools are more highly rated than conservative ones. As a graduate of NYU, I kidda doubt the quality of the experience is better than, let's say, U of Chicago.

Where is Harvard located? I'm lost without the (state) next to it.

why didnt they update the USNews web site yet?

Prof. Kerr,

I know it's "newsy" to report the U.S. News Rankings, especially when they're hot of the presses, and I'm sure a lot of people are interested in knowing them (in particular, 23-year-olds on chat boards). But I'm actually surprised that you would post them here. I always thought you/the VC would look quite skeptically on these very imperfect, crude measurements of the "quality" of law schools. But your post suggests that you buy into them as legit.

I guess what I'd like to know is, do you view these rankings as helpful in any way, rather than simply broad generalizations pandering to the rankings crowd?

I find it amazing that USC and USD (San Diego) have nearly identical bar passage rates for California. Yet the USC student body has substantially higher LSAT scores and - presumably - smarter students.

Shouldn't the #16 law school do a better job of educating its students than some second tier (50-100) school?

And Georgetown is a horrendously over ranked JD mill. I could open up my own school in DC, run it out of an abandoned McDonald's, graduate 5000 students a year, and crack the top 20 within a decade...

The magazine always changes the numbers around enough to make the issue seem newsy, and this year is no exception.

Not sure how this would work. So US News gathers all of their data for the year based on some pre-set formula, and things turn out exactly the same as last year. Are you suggesting that they would decide to change their rankings forumla on that basis? Or that they'd fudge some of their data?

It's hard to say the minor fluctuations that exist every year within the (very flawed) rankings system aren't there because that's what the methodology produces, but because of some illicit motive to be otherwise "newsy." Why not change or fudge even more then? Make Yale number 2 for once. People would certainly take notice.

If the goal were to be newsy they could certainly do a better job than keeping the same 14 schools in the top 14.

T14 Student:

In addition to clerkships and a pretty decent year with firms, two of our clinics made it all the way to SCOTUS this year. We also have virtually identical numbers to UCLA, and our rep scores (from US News) are higher than those of Vandy and USC.

I find it hard to believe that Brian Leiter somehow weighs us down so much that we now somehow rank below these schools.

The whole list is up at www.concurringopinions.com/

Am I the only one who sees the irony here? Everyone decries the USNWR rankings, but even the blog scholars can't resist obsessing over them. How sad.

Finally, Fordham broke into the top 25. It really IS underrated. : )

Shake-N-Bake,
It's not whether schools teach you what is going to be on the state bar - USD does not. Like most lower law schools, it hopelessly pretends that it's students are all going to get federal clerkships, and teaches things which no USD grad will ever use.

So why does a school like USD, which is #85, still manage to get the same results on the bar exam as #16 USC? Neither gives a leg up on CA law, and everybody takes the same BarBri courses. USD takes lower level students, so it should have a much lower pass rate.

The answer is either (1) USC does a relatively poor job at teaching it's students to actually think critically and express themselves coherently, or (2) the bar exam is somehow tilted in favor of stupid people who write in short sentences.

I think it's a little of both. Either way, it means that the rankings are not an objective measure of the quality of your legal education. Which leads me to the conclusion that the real rankings should have only two criteria (as I've said elsewhere): the average starting salary of grads, adjusted for regional variance in cost of living, and the cost of tuition.

ND's drop is surprising. Maybe US News is setting up for a surprise rebound next year?

Any partner, any judge, and any professor will tell you these rankings are bullshit. Fine, they're a good indicator of "groupings" but if there is even a single person out there sending a deposit to a 4 over 5 or a 7 over a 8 for no other reasons than numeracy--you've lost the "inquisitive lawyer" game already. Want the REAL rankings on prestige? Check out where SCOTUS clerks come from the past 50 years. Seriously. Tally it up. That's more telling than anything else.

Best quote: "horrendously over ranked JD mill."

And: "So how did NYU move itself up a consistent 5 or more slots and stay there?" A: John Sexton. The man is an amazing visionary. And he has a good post-up move as well.

Wooga,

You're missing at least one possible factor. Some of USC's best students will taking the bar exam in other states (e.g. New York) and those taking the CA bar will probably be a less qualified subset of their entire body. USD's best students will stay in CA.

"The answer is either (1) USC does a relatively poor job at teaching it's students to actually think critically and express themselves coherently, or (2) the bar exam is somehow tilted in favor of stupid people who write in short sentences."

The attitude in (2), that short sentences signal stupidity and that USD produces stupid people, makes you look like one of the 23 year olds on autoadmit who use USNews rankings to address some inadequacies that their parents wealth and their private schools can't get them.

dwlawson: Your goals are always the most important factor. Can you plan where you want to be three or four years from now? Factors such as knowing where you want to practice, whether you can work for a law firm during the school year (a firm that might hire you as an associate when you graduate), tuition costs, etc. are all important.

<blockquote>
I find it amazing that USC and USD (San Diego) have nearly identical bar passage rates for California. Yet the USC student body has substantially higher LSAT scores and - presumably - smarter students.

Shouldn't the #16 law school do a better job of educating its students than some second tier (50-100) school?
</blockquote>


Actually, check out the most recent bar admissions stats available (from July 06). Stanford has the best passage rate in California, followed by USC and UCLA; Boat is behind both of the L.A. schools. USC is at 86%, and USD is at 78%.

This Leiter bashing is absurd sour grapes from the autoadmit crowd. In his non-blog persona, Leiter is a well regarded scholar of legal philosophy and top notch Nietzsche scholar to boot.

OK: My apologies, in the initial reformatting I had some numbers wrong.

In the context of the USNWR numbers, errors introduced by reformatting are nothing to worry about.

The attitude in (2), that short sentences signal stupidity and that USD produces stupid people, makes you look like one of the 23 year olds on autoadmit who use USNews rankings to address some inadequacies that their parents wealth and their private schools can't get them.

Some Guy,
You obviously missed the entire point of my post, but I will refrain from impugning your education. As I said, the rankings imply that a USD student is more "stupid" than a USC grad, since they are 70 places apart. Yet in truth, based on bar pass rates, they are equally as "stupid." I do not think that USD grads are stupid.

Look, my wife went to USD, and failed the bar the first time. I told her the secret to passing the bar: write your answers as if you are a moron, stating the most obvious points in short sentences. This is because the grader assumes you are a moron, and assumes that if you do not write "the sky is blue," that you do not know that the sky is in fact blue. So in order to pass, you can't waste your time writing about clever arguments you might raise in a given fact pattern, but rather you have to pretend you are an unimaginative drone, spitting out obvious facts that any mouth breathing moron could spot. With this approach, my wife passed.

Me, I had the scores, wealth, and grades to go to any law school in the country. Instead, I chose to go to a tiny public law school in my home town on a free ride. I got a great education, certainly better than I would have gotten at a place like USC, despite being ranked well below. So keep your "elitist" slur to yourself.

I'm not speaking to whether Georgetown is "better" objectively than any other school; I only take exception to the characterization of Georgetown as "J.D. mill." It is a large school, and that has both advantages and disadvantages, depending on one's tastes.

I'm a Georgetown grad also, but I don't mind the JD mill insult so much, insofar as it refers to the night program (which is, I think, mainly where it comes from). I loved having the night students there, and they definately added to the atmosphere there, but (at least as I remember it from more than a decade ago) they didn't have the same overall numbers as the day program students did. So, in essence, you have 80% of the students equal to top-10 caliber students, and the other 20% that may be a couple of dozen ranks below that, which over all averages out to about #14. Those other 20% also dilute the relative resources available to the day students. Again, let me say that I liked having the night program there, to the extent I engaged with those students, and wouldn't trade it for an extra 4 spots in the the rankings.

I'll add that I thought the professors at Georgetown when I was there were incredible. My classes with guys like Bill Eskeridge and Mark Tushnet were great, and it's too bad they left for places like Yale and Harvard. I don't recall how much the quality of the faculty adds into the US News rankings, but at least when I was there, the faculty was top notch.

NYU and Columbia are comparable in terms of quality professors and quality students. I suspect that Columbia still enjoys a higher reputation with older partners and judges because when those individuals went to school, NYU was mid-first tier rather than top-5. Clerkship applicants from top schools that have always been top schools do a bit better than those from places like NYU, which are new to the upper ranks. However, I think that within a few years NYU grads will do just as well.

Long post

Those who doubt the quality/ranking of NYU Law's education have not attended NYU Law and also attended a competing school in order to make a truly informed comparison. NYU Law’s faculty are predominately if not solely haled from "top programs" and more importantly armed with top actual experience as with most top law school programs. However NYU faculty have the advantage of teaching core/specialty classes in the most complex and relevant legal play ground in the world, "down town New York City". To use an analogy it is like actually teaching astronauts about weightlessness in space as opposed to teaching them on earth or taking one’s students in a time machine to actually learn history. Furthermore, the goodwill associated with competing law schools like Columbia's, Harvard's, Stanford's, U Penn’s, Cornell’s and Yale's undergraduate programs could be argued as artificially boosting those attendant law schools' names, programs, applicant numbers and goodwill in many peoples' eyes. It may be an undeserved boost. It’s almost unarguable that all of Harvard's programs get a boost from the Harvard name regardless of their merit – whether this is deserved – who knows I would have to attend their programs or conduct a study much like U.S. News to get a better evaluation. Undoubtedly, if Princeton, Brown or Dartmouth started law programs in 2008 they would find themselves in the top 50 once accredited. Why, namesake and quality applicant draw do to namesake?

Conversely, the NYU Law program stands alone solely on its own merit and has created a name for its self. Arguably, NYU Law boosts the rest of the Campus and not vice versa. In my opinion, the University of Chicago Law is the only other law school in the top six in a similar "hold its own" or “stand on its merit alone” position without the benefit of the "Ivy League" or perceived Ivy League (i.e. Stanford) status of its undergraduate programs.

Therefore, why anyone would laugh or scoff at the fact NYU Law faculty teach core/specialty classes just as well or better and NYU Law Students learn those classes as well if not better than Chicago's, Columbia's, Harvard's student bodies etc is just good old "elitism", old-schoolism, label whorism, name brandism, bandwagonism and willful blindness.

As far as NYC being a desirable place to live, its arguable the LA, Miami, Las Vegas, and San Diego are more desirable locations yet the law schools in those cities have not yet cracked the top ten. Yes, the Village may be a nice place to live is some peoples’ view but NYU’s location can not explain its ranking – as Pace, Cuny, Cordozo, Brooklyn, New York Law, Rutgers et al. similar locations have not yet helped them crack the top twenty, thirty or fifty in some instances. In fact, Cordozo/Yeshiva Law and NYU Law almost sit on top of each other – it’s literally a eight minute walk.

As an aside, I think individuals need to realize that in a nation of nearly 290,000,000 people which boast thousands of academics contending for top law program admissions there are over enough applicants with top and duplicate credentials/scores to fill the 1L classes of four or five or more Harvards/Yales each with student bodies with equal or less than negligible merits/numbers. Even the student bodies of schools like UCLA Law, Virginia Law, BYU Law hold large numbers of students with GPAs, LSATs and credentials equivalent to a large percentage of the student bodies of law schools like Yale, Harvard etc. Because, the numbers are so close other criteria are used to distinguish the top schools and often just namesake alone is enough for some people (e.g., the U.S. news “peer assessment score” and “assessment score by lawyers and judges” surely favor Ivy League programs &Stanford). Even the bar passage rate of the top law schools could be attributed to the fact top laws admitted applicants with the highest scholastic numbers and best aptitude for standardized tests and not what those law schools taught them in the classroom nor due to the name of the law school. I.e., someone with 180 LSAT, 4.0 GPA and resources to devote themselves solely to bar studies is more likely to pass the bar then someone with 160 LSAT, 3.4 GPA and less resources or maybe not.

As one more aside, even smaller programs (i.e. “non-top ten”,“second tier”, “third tier” programs etc”) have churned out some of the most immensely successful and “top” attorneys e.g. John Cochran, Robert L. Shapiro, Greta Van Susteren, Senator John Edwards et al. Old-schoolers and “label whores” (used in the most respectable sense) need to realize times are changing.