Rankings
-
The “Leiden Rankings” of world universities are absurd…
…and stand out even in a field dominated by nonsense. For example: It’s true that Chinese universities have made remarkable strides, and some of them host superb centers of research and education. However, they aren’t nearly as dominant as those rankings suggest. To borrow a phrase from Mao Zedong, many Chinese universities are paper tigers:…
-
2003 survey of 150 leading legal academics evaluating faculty quality
Someone should really do this again, since U.S. News reputational surveys are done so poorly. The Survey and the MethodBetween March 3 and March 21, 2003, more than 150 leading legal scholars from around the nation completed the most thorough evaluation of American law faculty quality ever undertaken. Scholars were invited to participate in the…
-
SCOTUS clerkship placement, 1991 through 2005 (from 1/16/2006)
A propos this, here is an old study of placement in SCOTUS clerkships for 15 terms. Because of the small number of clerks chosen in a given year; because clerks are only chosen from the very top of any law school’s class; because current clerks participate in the process of selecting new clerks; and because…
-
Top Producers of Law Teachers at the Leading Law Schools Since 1995 (published originally January 31, 2011)
This study identifies the law school alma mater (J.D. only) of tenure-stream academic faculty at 43 leading law faculties who graduated since 1995. Faculty lists are current for 2010-11. “Leading” law faculties were defined as those that are either in the top 35 in the academic reputation surveys conducted by U.S. News & World Report…
-
Where U.S. law professors earned their law degree (2008)
The old Leiter Law Rankings site is going offline August 20, so readers who want any of the material there should copy it before then. I am going to post here some of the data that strike me as particularly useful, starting with data on placement in law teaching. =========== This study is based on…
-
Most cited legal philosophers by D-Index according to research.com (CORRECTED & UPDATED)
We’ve noted the “D-index” (an h-index for discipline-specific journals) calculated by research.com previously. (Their rankings of universities in law are pretty silly, since the faculty lists include deceasd faculty, retired faculty, and faculty who are not law professors.) They clearly don’t count law reviews for D-index, only faculty-edited journals, which is appropriate for legal philosophy.…
-
Trends in major gifts to law schools
Some interesting data from lawprof Sloan Speck (Colorado). Professor Speck references an earlier post of mine about whether “transformative” gifts really transform. It’s not clear to me that any of them “transformed” any of the affected schools. (Penn is ranked higher now in the silly USNews.com, but that’s due to a change in the formula…
-
Law Schools Unfairly Ranked by U.S. News
MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED OCT. 3 2011, SLIGHTLY REVISED IN THE INTERIM), SINCE IT IS TIMELY AGAIN I've occasionally commented in the past about particular schools that clearly had artificially low overall ranks in U.S. News, and readers e-mail me periodically asking about various schools in this regard. Since the overall rank in U.S. News is a…
-
LSAT scores aren’t what they used to be, and schools need not obsess about them
I missed this illuminating analysis by Derek Muller (Notre Dame) from several months ago, but it is worth reading!
-
This is a more plausible “ranking” of law reviews…
…based on an aggregation of various metrics. I would disregard the ordinal order entirely, and think solely in terms of "clusters." This is certainly more sensible than the bizarre Washington & Lee ranking of law reviews (which is part of this aggregation, but whose weirdness is neutralized by some of the other metrics used here).
-
Law schools should oppose an ABA proposal to double the experiential learning credits from 6 to 12
The ABA is up to mischief again, which needs to be opposed for the sake of law students. Here's what I wrote the last time this awful idea was being floated: Law schools differ, in their student bodies, in their employment outcomes. Law students differ, in their personal and professional goals, and in their…
-
Corporate Practice Commentator’s “top 10” corporate & securities articles for 2024
The selected articles are: Contract Production in M&A Markets, 171 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1881-1924 (2023), Choi, Stephen J; Gulati, Mitu; Jennejohn, Mathew; Scott, Robert E. Corporate Racial Responsibility, 124 Colum. L. Rev. 361-430 (2024), Fletcher, Gina-Gail S; Lovelace, H. Timothy Jr. Gender and the Social Structure of Exclusion in U.S. Corporate Law, 90 U.…
-
Will US News or the ABA audit these 10-month out employment statistics?
Some are certainly plausible, but many "stink to high heavens" as my Grandmother used to say. When someone who has Trump's ear is calling for fraud on US News to be grounds for sending University Presidents to prison, this is probably not the time to push the envelope! UPDATE: Professor Derek Muller (Notre Dame) writes:…
-
Projecting next year’s USNews.com law school rankings
Derek Muller offers another prognosis, based on the existing formula and the public data. Fluctuations in reputation scores, which do occur, will change the final results. One thing we know from the past is that the "overall" rankings starts to influence the reputational survey rankings. Will this start to affect schools like Columbia and NYU…
-
20 most cited International Law/National Security/Foreign Affairs Law faculty in the U.S., 2019-2023
Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the twenty most-cited law faculty working in international law, national security law and/or foreign affairs law in the U.S. for the period 2019-2023 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May/early June of 2024, and that the pre-2024 database did expand a bit since then). …
The phrase ‘Does the fact’ naturally invites howls of derision: it’s a fact that every child knows that the Japanese…