Rankings
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Which law school has the strongest scholarly faculty?
It's that time of year for another amusing Internet poll: pairwise comparisons of the "top 40" law faculties. More than 60 choices. Have fun!
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14 lateral moves that made law professors “take notice” during 2022-23
Based on my in-box and conversations with others, these were 14 moves that transpired this past year that were thought to be the biggest hiring coups (I usually list only ten, but this was another big year for lateral moves): *Derek Bambauer (intellectual property, law & technology) from the University of Arizona to the…
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Given the new (inexplicable) USNews.com ranking stew…
…Derek Muller (Iowa) predicts what next year's ranking will look like. There is always the possibility that the reputational scores will fluctuate (arbitrarily), but my guess is this won't be far off what the 2024 rankings look like! Note some of the dramatic changes predicted!
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Why did Yale’s academic reputation score plunge from (tied for) 3rd to (tied for) 6th this year?
Was it because Yale led the charge on the boycott of USNews.com? Was it the accumulated effect of various embarrassing events, from judges boycotting Yale over free expression issues to the Amy Chua melodrama? Was it a reflection of a widely perceived decline in the strength of Yale's younger faculty compared to their elders? Was…
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More on the new USNews.com ranking stew
Prof. Derek Muller (Iowa) breaks it down. Basically, the editors chose to downgrade the importance of "input" metrics (like LSAT and GPA), and dramatically increase the weight for output measures (like bar passage and employment), which now count for more than 50% of the overall score. In a way, this is salutary, since it will…
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USNews.com has outdone itself: it has made its law school rankings even more absurd than before!
There's not much to say about what is essentially a random ordering of law schools within tier groups. Any student who made a decision on the basis of small (and, in some cases, even large) ordinal differences in this year's travesty really should have a cause of action against USNews.com. (Some of the swings in…
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Did USNews.com miscalculate employment rates or did the schools misinterpret the data reported?
Derek Muller argues, plausibly, it was the latter.
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Will the USNews.com law school rankings for this year ever appear?
Hopefully not! It appears that without the free labor supplied by law schools of reporting data, the thinly staffed USNews.com operation has been having trouble transcribing data from the ABA into its ranking formula. Among the problems: the ABA corrected some of its initial data, but that may have been missed; and USNews.com may not…
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CEO of company that makes its $$$ by peddling consumer misinformation to students…
…is morally indignant that schools won't cooperate with his enterprise. This is some real chutzpah! They don't provide information, they collect data, don't audit it for accuracy, and then throw it into a nonsensical and inexplicable formula to produce an illusion of precision regarding supposed "qualitative" differences. It's precisely because they are not providing information…
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More on gaming the USNews.com rankings via “median” LSAT and GPA
UPDATED: A reader sent along the site to which my colleague, below, is referring. A colleague at a proverbial "top ten" law school writes with some interesting observations a propos yesterday's topic (esp. the issue raised in the "Update"): Because US News ranks schools based on *median* GPA and LSAT, many schools game admissions to…
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These are *not* the “choosiest” law schools, these are the ones most busy gaming USNews.com rankings
This is, alas, fairly gullible "reporting": No. 1 for the highest median undergraduate grade point average is the University of Alabama School of Law, which accepted students with a 2022 median undergrad GPA of 3.95. Yale Law’s undergrad GPA was 3.94, putting it in a tie with the University of Virginia School of Law and…
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Best American judges of the 20th century?
The earlier poll got nearly 200 responses, though since Professor Kerr (Berkeley) linked to it from his popular Twitter account, the responses probably came from more than just the regular blog readers. Of the write-ins (some of whom were not eligible, like Roger Taney [!]), the only one that got traction, rightly so, was Robert…
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Who were the best American judges of the 20th-century?
Here's a poll with I hope most of the likely choices for the "top 10". You can write-in others. Only judges no longer serving were eligible. Have fun!
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Professor Wax files grievance against Penn Law Dean Ruger
…according to Blog Emperor Caron, who has been keeping track. Most of those joined after USNews.com announced it would utilize only public data and its own survey data. According to the Blog Emperor, 53 schools have officially declined to join the boycott, while the rest are either hedging or not telling! An informative report from…
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So what might the new USNews.com ranking look like?
We know what the criteria will be, and we know most (but not all) of the inputs, what we don't know is the new arbitrary "weightings." Professor Muller (Iowa) charts the possibilities on various reasonable assumptions about weightings. (I'm not sure those schools boycotting the rankings will do worse in the reputational surveys, but we'll…
Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii