Try it out. A sociologist friend, Kieran Healy, tipped me off to this. Until there have been about 10,000 comparisons or so, the results probably won't make a lot of sense–so everyone do their part, and cast 50 votes or so! (I've listed 55 law schools for purposes of this survey.)
UPDATE (1/15/11): Final results here.
UPDATE (1/9/11): So with votes on more than 20,000 comparisons, here are the results so far–not utterly crazy (though testimony to the dominance of US News in how even academics think about school quality, with a handful of exceptions):
1. Yale University (96)
2. Harvard University (93)
2. Stanford University (93)
4. Columbia University (90)
4. University of Chicago (90)
6. New York University (87)
7. University of Pennsylvania (82)
7. University of Virginia (82)
9. University of California, Berkeley (81)
9. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (81)
11. Duke University (79)
12. Cornell University (76)
12. Northwestern University (76)
14. University of California, Los Angeles (75)
14. University of Texas, Austin (75)
16. Georgetown University (74)
17. University of Southern California (70)
17. Vanderbilt University (70)
19. George Washington University (60)
20. Boston University (58)
21. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (56)
22. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (55)
23. Washington University, St. Louis (54)
24. University of California, Irvine (52)
24. University of Iowa (52)
26. Boston College (51)
27. Emory University (48)
27. Fordham University (48)
27. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (48)
30. University of Notre Dame (43)
31. College of William & Mary (41)
32. Indiana University, Bloomington (40)
33. Ohio State University (38)
34. University of California, Davis (37)
34. University of California, Hastings (37)
36. Washington & Lee University (36)
37. University of Colorado, Boulder (33)
37. University of San Diego (33)
39. Florida State University (32)
39. University of Washington, Seattle (32)




To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…