- If Imitation is Flattery, Thanks!
Super Lawyers released its first law school rankings this week with a methodology taken straight from the Lawdragon playbook.
When Lawdragon released its first law school ranking in 2007, we came up with a new twist on the controversial formula used by U.S. News & World Report. Rather than give points for number of library volumes or the vague ‘reputation’ criteria, we tallied the law schools attended by the members of our annual Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America. It’s a fresh, practice-oriented approach that looks at the producers of leading practitioners, corporate counsel and judges.
Both Above the Law and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog offered their take on the Super Lawyers Law School ranking. While both questioned the need for another law school ranking, we’d like to note that after a decade or so of discussing the U.S. News & World Report rankings with practitioners, judges and academicians nationwide, it’s clear that it is considered at worst a flawed system and at best one in sore need of alternatives.
Here is the link to the Super Lawyers Law Schools.
While we have our differences with Super Lawyers’ overall methodology and approach to selecting its list of lawyers, the resulting law school list is quite similar to Lawdragon’s – a distinct reflection of schools producing top practitioners.
We compared the top 30 law schools for Lawdragon and Super Lawyers and found only four differences.
Lawdragon includes: USC, St. John's, Tulane and University of Houston. Super Lawyers includes: University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, Temple (link currently down) and UNC. Many of the discrepancies in the lists are based on Super Lawyers’ inclusion of 5 percent of lawyers from most U.S. jurisdictions compared to Lawdragon’s inclusion of just 500 lawyers and judges nationwide. Super Lawyers is also based in Minnesota, while Lawdragon is based in California and New York.
Sure to add fuel to the fire over the law school ranking debate, the much-maligned U.S. News’ 2009 rankings has 10 schools in its top 30 not included in either Lawdragon or Super Lawyers: Washington University in St. Louis, Emory University, Indiana University, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Notre Dame, University of Iowa, College of William and Mary, University of Alabama, University of Washington Washington and Lee University. (US News has five schools tied at 30, hence the hefty number.)
Here are the 21 schools on the top 30 lists of all three. They are listed in Lawdragon order:
1. Harvard
2. Yale
3. Columbia
4. New York University
5. University of Texas
6. Georgetown
7. Boalt Hall
8. University of Chicago
9. University of Virginia
10. University of Michigan
11. UCLA
12. University of Pennsylvania
13. Stanford
14. Northwestern
15. George Washington
16. Duke
17. Fordham
18. Boston University
19. Vanderbilt
20. Boston College
21. Cornell
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| 06:45 PM Nov 18, 2009 | Email the Daily Dragon | Email this Article | Post Comments |
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