Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Law School Rankings
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Henderson & Morriss: Regional Law Schools May Be Better Deal Than Elite Schools
William D. Henderson (Indiana) & Andrew P. Morriss (Illinois), What Rankings Don’t Say About Costly Choices: Some Students Should Consider Lower-Ranked Schools That Offer More Grants, Better Opportunities (National Law Journal): Based upon our combined 21 years of experience as legal educators and our empirical study of rankings, we think students rely on law school
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Law School Rankings by BigLaw Employment
Top Law Schools Tighten Their Hold on NLJ 250 Firms (National Law Journal), by Leigh Jones: A bigger percentage of students graduating from top law schools in 2007 took jobs at NLJ 250 law firms than those graduating in 2006. Columbia landed in the No. 1 spot again as the school that sent the greatest
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Video of Q&A With Robert Morse, U.S. News Rankings Guru
Video of the hour-long ABA-sonsored Q&A with Robert Morse, the impresario of the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, is available here. Update: For a summary of Morse’s comments, see here.
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Vault’s Top 25 Law Schools Based on Preparation for Law Practice
Vault has released a ranking of the Top 25 law schools based on a survey of "nearly 400 hiring partners, hiring committee members, associate interviewers and recruiting professionals across the country on which law schools best prepare their graduates to achieve in the firm environment": With 58% of law school graduates entering private practice, Vault’s
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More Law School Rankings News
Al Brophy, US News: Take 4–Lawyer/Judge Assessment Scores: The mean change for Lawyer/Judge assessment is negative (reflecting lower ratings in 2009 than 2008), but it’s only -0.02. The SD, while also fairly small (0.16), is more than twice that for peer assessment, which perhaps deserved more attention than I’ve given it so far. And now
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Two Form Memos for Law School Deans in Response to U.S. News Rankings
Gregory M. Stein (Tennessee) has published a very telling op-ed in today’s Chicago Tribune: Note From the Dean: Send After U.S. News Rankings are Published, which contains two alternative letters to be sent by a law school dean, depending on whether his or her school has risen or fallen in the latest U.S. News rankings:
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Yale 1L Takes Deans to Task for Obsessing Over U.S. News Rankings
Law Schools Shouldn’t Grub For Rankings (Hartford Courant), by Michael Seringhaus (J.D. 2010, Yale): In this piece, I discuss the overblown and often alarmist reactions of law school deans to the 2009 U.S. News rankings, published last Friday, in light of the their 2006 open letter to prospective students — in which law school deans
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Average U.S. News Ranking, 1996-2009
Adjunct Law Prof passed along the average U.S. News & World Report overall ranking from 1996-2009 for the Top 30 law schools from 1996 (with data from Law Librarian Blog), to which I have added each school’s 2009 overall ranking (red indicates the 2009 ranking is higher than the 14-year average): 1996-2009 Mean School 2009
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More U.S. News Rankings Coverage
Buffalo, Case, Iowa, Miami, Minnesota & UNC Deans React to Decline in U.S. News Rankings (Updated TaxProf Blog Post) The Contradictory Goals of Law School Rankings (Concurring Opinions), by Dan Solove Grad Rankings: Share Your Feels (Morse Code, U.S. News & World Report), by Robert Morse Isn’t Bar Passage a Terrible Law School Ranking Metric?
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U.S. News Reveals Actual Ranking of Tier 3 and Tier 4 Schools
Geoffrey Rapp (Toledo) reveals the schools ranked #105 through #184.
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2009 U.S News Peer Reputation Rankings v. Overall Rankings
Yesterday, I blogged the 2009 U.S News Peer Reputation Rankings and Overall Rankings for all 184 law schools. Here is a list of the schools with at least a five-point difference in the two ranking measures among the schools with a numerical overall ranking (i.e. the Top 105 schools; not the Tier 3 and Tier
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2009 U.S. News Rankings: Tax v. Overall
Following up on Friday’s post on the new 2009 U.S. News Tax Rankings: the following chart shows the differences between a school’s tax reputation and its overall reputation and overall ranking as measured by U.S. News:
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Rankings Implications of the NCAA Basketball Tournament
Amid Basketball Euphoria, Davidson’s Admissions Officials Fret About Yield (Chronicle of Higher Education), by Lawrence Biemiller: Christopher Gruber, Davidson College’s vice president for admissions and financial aid, spent the weekend worrying. Interviewed Saturday by NPR—after Davidson’s 73-to-56 romp over Wisconsin, but before Sunday afternoon’s 59-to-57 loss to top-seeded Kansas—Mr. Gruber was trying to guess how
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2009 U.S News Peer Reputation Rankings (v. Overall Rankings)
The new online 2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings do not yet offer a way to sort by the various categories (although I am told that this feature will be added at some point in the future). On Friday, Richard Schmalbeck (Duke) shared the the Top 44 law schools by academic peer reputation. Here is
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Buffalo, Case, Iowa, Miami, Minnesota & UNC Deans React to Decline in U.S. News Rankings
David Lat collects school-wide emails (updated here) sent by these deans in response to their school’s decline in the just-released U.S. News rankings: Buffalo (#100, down from #77), Case Western (#63, down from #53), Iowa (#27, down from #24), Minnesota (#22, down from #20), and North Carolina (#38, down from #36). Miami (#82, down from
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New 2009 U.S. News Tax Rankings
The new 2009 U.S. News Law School Tax Rankings were released today: 1. NYU (#1 last year) 2. Florida (#2) 3. Georgetown (#3) 4. Northwestern (#4) 5. UCLA (#7) 6. Harvard (#5) 6. Miami (#6) 8. Boston University (#8) 9. Virginia (#10) 10. Michigan (#13) 10. Texas (#9) 10. Yale (#10) 13. Loyola-L.A. (#16) 13.
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Top 44 Law Schools by Peer Reputation (v. Overall Ranking)
Richard Schmalbeck (Duke) passed along the Top 44 law schools by academic peer reputation in the just-released 2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings (I’ve added the overall ranking): 1. (4.8) Harvard (2) Yale (1) 3. (4.7) Columbia (4) Stanford (2) 5.
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Advance Copy of 2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings
The 2009 U.S. News law school rankings are due to be released March 28, but purported advance copies are already circulating on the Internet. Here is a purported pdf copy of the Top 100 (104 with ties), along with the data from the various categories for the Top 58 schools. The list is reproduced in
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ABA Journal on the U.S. News Law School Rankings
Check out the cover story in the April 2008 ABA Journal: The Rankings Czar: Law Deans Hate Bob Morse’s Rankings; He’d Like Their Help to Make Them Better, by Lynda Edwards: [Houston Dean Nancy Rapoport’s] tears at a meeting with students and faculty six years later became a law school legend. The school had learned,
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Citation Rankings: The Velocity Factor
In our article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83, 93 (2006), Bernie Black and I note that one of the problems with using citation count rankings is that they favor more senior faculty and value older work that accumulates citations over time. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports
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Law School Rankings: The Play
Jeff Sovern (St. John’s) has posted Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools on SSRN. The abstract is here. Robert Ambrogi provides a nice review: His belief, as he writes in the play’s introduction, is that "law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away from improving the quality of the
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Green Bag Launches New Law School Rankings to Measure Faculty “Deadwood”
The Green Bag has announced a forthcoming annual ranking of law schools — the "Deadwood Rankings": Fair Warning to Law Schools … And an invitation to 1Ls, 2Ls & 3Ls, 11 Green Bag 2d 139 (Spring 2008). Here is the abstract: Aspiring law students and professors should have more and better information about the relative