My MoneyLaw colleague Jim Chen has a wonderful post on The Mismeasurement of Merit, which proposes a new measure of law school success:  "Reputation Independent Performance Statistics":

Surely there exists some combination of statistics that can measure differences in actual performance among law schools, while minimizing the baneful and distorting effects of subjective judgments regarding merit. It may be premature, but I like the idea of Reputation Independent Performance Statistics, or RIPS. Law review impact factors and citation counts, to be sure, operate under the heavy influence of academic reputation. But unlike the U.S. News and Leiter rankings, law review impact factors and citation counts do not depend on some sort of survey. They are incredibly hard to influence, let alone to "fake," absent an extraordinary (and therefore laudable) scholarly effort by a faculty. Those who object to treating these measures as "reputation independent" might be willing to accept a less ambitious description, such as "minimally subjective," or "minsub" for short. These are strictly questions of nomenclature. The bottom line remains the same. Until someone persuades me to the contrary, I am prepared to declare that some metric based on law review impact factors and/or citation counts should be included in any effort to compute RIPS, or Reputation Independent Performance Statistics, in legal academia.