New Rankings: Yale #1; Harvard #4?

J
Sep 7, 2007 5:13 AM CST

Leiter’s rankings only measure the number of times a professor is cited.  This only measures a professor’s popularity among other professors (which is often heavily influenced by USNWR rankings).  It says nothing about whether these professors are good at instructing students or if the schools produce competent graduates.  While USNWR is not a perfect (or even very good system), Leiter manages to produce a ranking system that is utterly worthless to those looking to enroll in law school or hire graduates who may become productive lawyers.

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The Legendary Danny O'Doul
Sep 7, 2007 6:00 AM CST

I thought Cardozo Law School was number 3 ?

Sincerely,
The Legendary Danny O’Doul*

*Legendary Singer, Masterchef, Friend of the american indian, Inventor of the O’Doul Timing Chip tm, Forward Legal Thinker, J.D., and
Celbrity Metallurgist.

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MB
Sep 7, 2007 6:31 AM CST

USNWR and citations are apples and oranges as far as rankings go, so there is no sense in which any schools moves “up” or “down” in one or the other.  Closest proxy to citations in USNWR might be reputations among profs, where UT is much closer to 10 (12th?).

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Pernicious
Sep 7, 2007 6:43 AM CST

Leiter’s method of evaluation may be ok as another imperfect tool for eval. As noted, however,neither it nor UN≀ measure teaching or graduate competency. Also, for those evaluating law schols outside of the first 5, that tend to concentrate more on the law and practice of their home state or region, Leiter’s method would unfairly rank schools based on the size of the state (the larger the state the more citations to state-based legal articles).

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Lawprof
Sep 7, 2007 6:56 AM CST

There seems to be a lot of ignorance about the legal academy and legal scholarship in these comments.  It is totally wrong that “outside” the top 5, law faculty concentrate on “the law and practice of their home state.”  That may be true of the fourth tier schools in USNWR, but it’s totally wrong about most of the top 100 law schools.  There is no evidence that there is an “inverse” or “nonexistence” relationship between scholarship and quality of legal education.  Lindgren at Northwestern did a study which, in fact, found a correlation.  Citations reflect the impact of scholarly ideas, imperfectly as Leiter says, but fairly well.  It’s hard to believe that the commenters here really don’t think the scholarly quality of a faculty matters.  Would you tell your kid to pick Pace over Columbia?

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RJK
Sep 7, 2007 7:47 AM CST

Perhaps we should abandon all other legal and academic standards, or maybe teaching all together.  The concept that qualitative rankings based on a simple quantitative factor - number of citations - is irreparable flawed.  Scholarly articles are not influential based on number of citations, but their impact on the legal system in total.

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Mike H.
Sep 7, 2007 8:00 AM CST

I agree with David H. that “scholarly” citations often reflect mutual back-patting and professorial political infighting.  Looking only at citations in “scholarly” journals perpetuates the incestuousness of legal “scholarship.”  Most of these articles have little or no direct impact on the development of the law or the real world.  Why not also include citations by courts (especially the SCOTUS, federal courts of appeals, and state supreme courts), code annotations, prominent professional trade journals that practitioners rely heavily upon but that professors often don’t read, etc.?  Some professors at “lower tier” schools are writing works that are having a more direct, profound impact on the development of law than the “scholarly” articles upon which Leiter solely focuses.

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Another Law Prof
Sep 7, 2007 8:07 AM CST

My post crossed paths with Mike H’s, who says, “Some professors at “lower tier” schools are writing works that are having a more direct, profound impact on the development of law than the “scholarly” articles upon which Leiter solely focuses.”  Who is Mike H. thinking of?  Among the most cited profs are John Coffee, Laurence Tribe, Arthur Miller, and Mark Lemley, all of whom have had big impacts on the law in their fields, who are relied upon by courts and lawyers.

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John Sands
Sep 7, 2007 8:20 AM CST

My own experience, both as a former law student (at Yale L.S.) and law school professor (at Albany L.S.), is that more critical factors are low student-to-faculty ratio and the caring involvement of faculty in their students’ lives.  The top 10% of students at all law schools have the ability to succeed at any law school; the challenge of faculty is to engage their enthusiasm and creativity. 

For the most part these studies are meaningless.  That said,  it’s still gratifying to know that Yale remains no. 1 by any measure.

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Dan Kuhn
Sep 7, 2007 9:06 AM CST

Just when I thought it was possible for rankings to be even more ridiculous, Leiter releases rankings that are not just meaningless but actually the REVERSE of what is true.

Is Leiter seriously advancing the concept that if a professor spends all of their time writing scholarly articles and zero time on class prep, blowing through classes and using scantron multiple choice finals that makes for a good law school?  Utterly ridiculous by any stretch.

What makes a good law school is the quantity and quality of interactions between the people.  Law schools with a collaborative (read: no class rank) environment do this especially well.  Interaction with people and effective communication are qualities that translate into the real world. 
Leiter’s rank should be reversed, because interaction with students is inversely proportional to amount of scholarly articles only read by other professors a given person churns out.

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D
Sep 7, 2007 9:36 AM CST

I would not recommend my child choose Pace over Columbia, but that has no relation at all to Columbia professors dominating Pace professors in the arena of scholarly publications.  It instead reflects the fact that employers will be more impressed with my Columbia-graduate son than my Pace-graduate son simply because he is a Columbia graduate.

I have two associates that work for me.  One graduated from the University of Chicago, the other from the University of Illinois.  The former gets the research assignments; the latter gets the depositions and the second chair.

To me, that is the true measure of a law school, whether it prepares its students to operate in a law firm environment and in a courtroom, not whether this professor or that is published and how many times.

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B
Sep 7, 2007 10:25 AM CST

I find both methods to be pretty questionable. The whole system is based on reputation. I think even if the Harvard and Yale were terrible they would still maintain a good reputation for quite some time. Similarly, no person is going to cite or approve of any tier 4 school’s work because it lacks reputation. Put the best professor at a tier four school and I bet he would have difficulty being cited or acknowledged as a good scholar.

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Martin -YLS class of 1969
Sep 7, 2007 11:18 AM CST

When I entered Yale Law School,in the Fall of 1966, the NY Times Magazine published an article entitled: “Yale vs. Harvard - Legal Division.” It concluded that Yale was the best small law school in the country and Harvard was the best big one.My entering class at Yale was about 175. Harvard was approximately three times as large.

John Coffee, who is mentioned in comment #16, was a classmate. (“Hello, Jack!”) Many of my classmates and friends went on to careers on the bench, as law school professors, and in the legal and corporate and political worlds. A couple became journalists, but what can you do?

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Rolf Asphaug
Sep 7, 2007 11:34 AM CST

Factor in the educational benefits to law students of living in the legal and cultural capital of the world, and it should be clear that Columbia Law School is tops. :-)

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Steve Kauffman
Sep 7, 2007 1:00 PM CST

Who cares??  You guys really have too much time on your hands.  Why don’t you try focusing on your students instead of yourselves.

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Dave Brink
Sep 7, 2007 1:36 PM CST

Suppose that a multibillionare endowed a law school that would employ many great legal scholars who would be able to spend their time writing scholarly legal articles and treatises. ( This would please many law professors.) They would have a large output which would be increasingly cited.  This hypothetical law school would soon rank as Number One based on citations, which conceivably could prove embarrassing to Prof Leiter when it was discovered that the professors had given up teaching students altogether.

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R. S.
Sep 7, 2007 3:45 PM CST

In response to the Stetson Law grad, Michigan students will be even more highly recruited this year and will study even harder because they do not have a football team to watch!!

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JD Rawcliffe
Sep 8, 2007 8:12 PM CST

Cardozo #3?!  What ARE you smoking?  Is that what the recruiters told you?  And Pacies, sorry, you’ll never be Columbia, especially not with your provincial homophobia.  Having said that, in general, both rankings suck.

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Sick of self-righteous teachers
Sep 9, 2007 12:16 PM CST

“Would you tell your kid to pick Pace over Columbia?”

If I wanted my kid to be a good lawyer, I’d send him to a school that emphasizes teaching quality and fundamentals over rankings and publications.  Somewhere that the professors have actually been in a courtroom at some point in their career.

If I wanted him to be part of the “club,” I’d send him somewhere that the teachers spend all of their time focused on publications that have nothing to do with the day-to-day practice of law, rather than focused on the classroom.

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Mike H.
Sep 10, 2007 10:51 AM CST

In response to “Another Law Prof,” I concede that some of the most cited “scholarly” authors also have an impact on the development of the law and on the real world.  I simply indicated that “some” professors at lower tiered schools are having more of that type of impact than the authors Leiter studied.  In order to find out how much that is true, a broader study along the lines of what I proposed should be done.  One of my colleagues has written several articles that have served as the catalyst to change the law in our state, and he is certainly not alone.  Some professors may not be well known names among the elites in the academy, but that doesn’t mean they are not having an important impact on the legal profession.

As for quality of legal training—when I was an associate at a major law firm about 20 years ago, a summer associate who had just finished his first year at Yale came to me paralyzed because a partner asked him to write a legal memorandum on an issue of law.  He had no idea what to do.  He didn’t even know how to do basic research and analysis.  He told me that his Legal Writing professor spent his class time discussing legal theory (from a leftist perspective, not surprisingly).  I have seen countless moot court briefs as a law student, lawyer, and now law professor, and the two worst I ever read were by a team from Yale and one from my own alma mater (which is a top 10 school I won’t name to spare it the negative publicity, because I’m a loyal grad).  Both were embarrassingly bad.  But of course, none of that matters in the elitist world of rankings!

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T
Sep 12, 2007 3:11 PM CST

I was a practicing lawyer for over 30 years. During that period I hired dozens of law school students and graduates as law clerks and associates. In the first 10 years I tried hiring a few 3rd year Harvard students as lawclerks and found them dramatically lacking compared to most of the B.U. Law, B.C. Law, and NorthEastern Law students and graduates I have hired.

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The Legendary Danny O'Doul
Sep 17, 2007 2:44 PM CST

Stetson is a great law school.
And, with a fully-paid enrollment, each student
gets a snappy straw cowboy hat!
At Harvard all you get is a six pack of
warm Sam Adams!
Sincerely,
The Legendary Danny O’Doul*

*Attorney to Famous Rockabilly Musicians

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