Following up on last Sunday’s post, Projected 2026-27 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Above the Law, Get Ready For U.S. News Law School Rankings To Make No Sense:

Law schools boycotting the rankings turned the whole thing into a joke. …

Once upon a time, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings served a purpose. Not a particularly noble purpose, mind you, but a functional one. …

The boycott [Law Schools That Boycotted The U.S. News Rankings] — and the changes made to deal with it — really screwed all this up. Yale decided in a huff to stop cooperating with USNWR on its rankings, bringing a number of schools along for the ride. Schools couched the boycott as a matter of respecting public interest work and standing up for financial aid, which sounds great until you scratched the surface. But most of all, cutting off access to critical data prevented U.S. News from doing the one thing U.S. News did well: democratizing insider knowledge.

The schools wanted out of the rankings game. U.S. News adapted in ways that made the rankings less meaningful. Prospective students now have to do more independent research to understand what different schools actually offer. Perhaps that’s the outcome the boycotting deans wanted all along. Or perhaps they just didn’t think this through.

Let’s go with the latter. …

This couldn’t come at a worse time for students. U.S. News deserved the criticism it took over the years for overprivileging inputs like undergrad GPAs and LSAT scores over outputs, but right now those inputs carry more importance than ever.

Now that Biglaw has accelerated its recruiting process to extend summer associate offers before students have even received their first semester grades, whole careers are getting decided on vibes. If employers are making hiring decisions with no regard to the actual learning the law part, it means they’re making hiring decisions based on the school’s admissions.

It is a very stupid way to hire lawyers, but it’s the way we’re doing it. And a reliable ranking of perceived prestige would come in handy right about now.

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