I am once again chair of the GMUSL appointments committee, which means I am eligible to vote in the U.S. News law school reputation survey, which means, in turn, that I am once again being inundated with p.r. materials from various law schools.
Most of it is done badly, and is at best a waste of money, and at worst counter-productive. Today, for example, I received the “annual report” of a fourth-tier law school–the same report that goes out to alumni and other members of that law school’s community. My first impression: why would anyone at this law school think that I want to read its annual report?
Nevertheless, for the benefit of VC readers, I opened it up, to see if, indeed, looking at it would confer any reputational benefits on the school in question. The very first thing I saw in the report is that the school’s 75th percentile LSAT is 157 (for the uninitiated, this is not impressive, especially because it makes one wonder whether the median is much lower). I flipped through the rest of the report, which contained the usual “Professor X spoke at an important conference on the future of legal reform in outer Slovobia” and “Women alumni form networking group” sorts of stuff. But what stuck in my head was the 157 75th percentile LSAT.
What sort of “law porn” might I actually read, and which also might actually benefit a law school’s reputation? How about a postcard listing one to three favorable facts about the law school that most professors probably don’t know. For example, if I were writing such a card about GMU, it might say things like, “Did you know that the median LSAT of students in the George Mason Law School class of 2012 is 164, 30th (or whatever, I’m not sure) best in the country?” “Did you know that two GMU law professors have been appointed to and are currently members of the Federal Circuit?” “Did you know that GMU’s forty full-time faculty members hold a total of twenty advanced degrees other than a J.D. or L.L.B.?” “Did you know that over half of the Article III judiciary has taken courses through GMU’s Law and Economics Center?”