As many in the legal blogosphere have noted, the the new U.S. News law school rankings are out.
Some of the bigger news this year is an unusual drop for my own school, George Washington, which in the last decade has bounced around between 19 and 25 and averages somewhere around 21. This year we went from 20 to 28, which may reflect the decision by the US News folks to change the way they compute the rankings by including part-time GPA/LSAT scores in the mix (that is, the scores of the night students). But who knows: These numbers seem to bounce around mostly at random, and my guess is that next year the numbers will bounce back to where they were.
Oh, and I should make the usual caveat: No one other than law students and law school applicants actually think the year-to-year variations have any significance, so there’s a good argument to ignore the rankings. On the other hand, law students and applicants are a pretty important audience for law schools, and rightly or wrongly,the rankings have a major influence on school morale. As a result, they’re a bit too big too ignore, even if the numbers are so often misunderstood.