Following up on Monday’s post, XPT Top 25 Law School Rankings (Alpha Phase):  Donald Tobin (Maryland; Google Scholar), Building a Better Mousetrap: There Must Be Something Better Than U.S. News:

There must be a better way. U.S. News has dominated law school rankings for several decades, and its decisions about what to rank and how to weigh those factors have had a significant impact on legal education, and, in my view, not in a good way. Especially now, as U.S. News is ranking based on its survey and then on publicly available data, U.S. News has no expertise in this area and is doing no more than aggregating data and presenting it in a way that makes the results seem objective. The U.S. News rankings measure what they measure, but I am not sure why a publication, with no expertise in law or law schools, should be whom we look to for guidance about what makes a “best law school.” 

At some point, those, like me, who constantly harp on the rankings and why they are bad for legal education and law students need to propose something better. I am pleased that the University of Maryland Institute for Clinical and Translational research has provided me with a small grant and statistical advice to see if there is a better way to evaluate law schools. At the very least, we should start our evaluation with a basic question, what makes a top law school? What factors do experts and users believe make a top law school, and how do we capture the data necessary to measure those factors?

I recognize that the real problem here is that there is no good way to rank law schools. People do and should choose a law school for many different reasons. How important is scholarship v. teaching for a top law school? How about the student experience? How many journals, teams or other opportunities are there for students?

As I move forward on these new rankings, I hope TaxProf readers will help provide advice on the right questions to ask in developing new metrics so we can develop rankings that better reflect the richness of what law schools do.

Donald Tobin is the former dean at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. He is now a professor of law at Maryland Carey Law and a member of LSAC Legal Education Consulting.

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