Comparing U.S. News Faculty Reputation Rank with “Scholarly Impact”

By David Bernstein on March 13, 2013 12:31 pm in Law Schools

Below I’ve created a table listing the top fifty-five law schools according to their “peer” ranking on U.S. News, with the last column showing each school’s ranking according to the latest “scholarly impact” study conducted by folks at St. Thomas Law School. Two schools stand out as being wildly underranked by their peers compared to their scholarly impact: George Mason, ranked 55 by peers but 21 by scholarly impact, and Cardozo, ranked 51 by peers and 25 by scholarly impact. In fact, no other schools ranked as well as Cardozo and George Mason in scholarly impact ranked lower than 23rd in the U.S. News peer rankings.

The most overranked school by these measures is Wisconsin, which is ranked 23 by peers but is not in the top 55 by scholarly impact. (St. Thomas, by the way, is well out of the top 55 by peer ranking, but is number 31 in scholarly impact.)

Note that U.S. News asks academic rankers to rate law school quality, not scholarly prowess of the faculty. Still, there is a strong enough relationship between the two overall for anomalies to be notable.

H/T to Paul Caron at Taxprof, who created a similar table comparing Peer Rank to overall U.S. News rank.

Peer Rank	Peer Score	School	Scholarly Impact
1	4.8	Yale	1
1	4.8	Harvard	2
1	4.8	Stanford	4
4	4.6	Chicago	3
4	4.6	Columbia	6
6	4.4	NYU	5
6	4.4	Virginia	16
6	4.4	UC-Berkeley	10
6	4.4	Michigan	15
10	4.3	Penn	11
11	4.2	Duke	11
11	4.2	Cornell	9
13	4.1	Northwestern	13
13	4.1	Georgetown	18
13	4.1	Texas	19
16	3.9	UCLA	14
17	3.8	Vanderbilt	8
18	3.6	USC	24
18	3.6	Washington University	26
20	3.5	Minnesota	19
20	3.5	Emory	26
20	3.5	North Carolina	33
23	3.4	George Washington	16
23	3.4	Notre Dame	38
23	3.4	Boston University	21
23	3.4	Wisconsin	Not in top 55
23	3.4	UC-Davis	23
28	3.3	Indiana-Bloomington	33
28	3.3	Iowa	47
28	3.3	Washington & Lee	30
28	3.3	Boston College	52
32	3.2	William & Mary	41
32	3.2	Ohio State	30
32	3.2	Fordham	41
32	3.2	UC-Hastings	38
36	3.1	University of Washington	28
36	3.1	Georgia	Not in top 55
36	3.1	Wake Forest	Not in top 55
36	3.1	Colorado	28
36	3.1	Florida	Not in top 55
36	3.1	Illinois	28
42	3.0	Alabama	47
42	3.0	Arizona State	52
42	3.0	Arizona	33
42	3.0	Maryland	41
42	3.0	Tulane	Not in top 55
42	3.0	American	47
48	2.9	Utah	47
48	2.9	BYU	Note in top 55
48	2.9	Florida State	33
51	2.8	Cardozo	25
51	2.8	Connecticut	Not in top 55
51	2.8	Miami	Not in top 55
51	2.8	Oregon	Not in top 55
55	2.7	George Mason	21
55	2.7	Temple	Not in top 55
55	2.7	Denver	Not in top 55
55	2.7	Case Western	38
55	2.7	Loyola-L.A.	Not in top 55
55	2.7	San Diego	52
55	2.7	Pittsburgh	Not in top 55

Navigation

Comparing U.S. News Faculty Reputation Rank with “Scholarly Impact”

Comments are closed.