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    It’s likely that Notre Dame will return to a policy of requiring GREs next year (this year they’re officially optional…

50 Best Law School Faculties in Terms of Scholarly Distinction, 2016 edition

Here's a list of 76 faculties that might have some claim on having one of the 50 strongest law faculties in terms of scholarly distinction (with apologies to any wrongly omitted).  Have fun!  Detailed ballott reporting will make attempts at strategic voting obvious, so don't!  I'll call out your school!  Remember, this is about the scholarly distinction of the faculties, so if all you know is the U.S. News rank, don't complete the survey, or choose "no opinion" for those schools! 

BAD BEHAVIOR WATCH:  Remarkably, 4  people have ranked Arizona State ahead of Yale!  I wonder where they teach?  By way of comparison, only 3 people ranked Columbia ahead of Yale (though 5 did give that edge to Berkeley)–at least this voting is defensible, depending on one's benchmarks for scholarly excellence.  ASU is one of the top regional law schools in my judgment, but there's no honest ordering in which it comes out ahead of Yale.  (I use Yale as the comparison only because that's easy to read off the data, since Yale is currently #1–when Harvard was #1, the pattern was similar.)  If you want to get a sense of attempted strategic voting, take a look at how much schools lower down the list lose to Yale by:  most lose in a shut-out, but several, including ASU, do not.  Tsk, tsk!

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