- How not to judge law schools
Well, here's the main flaw in the U.S. News survey: One quarter of a law school's ranking depends on ratings by randomly selected professors at other schools. Another 15 percent is based on a survey of randomly selected lawyers and judges. As George Mason law professor Ilya Somin points out in the Volokh Conspiracy, "there are some 190 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S. The average professor doesn't know much about what is going on at the vast majority of them." The same is true of judges and lawyers polled for the survey. You can see the problem – too many people making too many uninformed judgments (kind of like the voters on “Dancing with the Stars”). So does that make the ratings useless? Yes and no.
Some valuable information can still be gleaned from them, especially if the errors of the ignorant US News voters somehow cancel each other out, leaving those knowledgeable about a given school to actually determine its ranking. However, I suspect that errors are not randomly distributed, and that there are some systematic biases. In particular, the voters are less likely to recognize the quality of schools that have recently improved their faculties and/or student bodies (this hurts George Mason, among others), less likely to give high rankings to schools outside major metro areas on the East and West coasts, and so on. I also suspect that the professors - and even more so the lawyers and judges - are likely to base their evaluations in part on what was true when they were in law school rather than regularly updating their evaluations of schools outside the top 20 or 30.
Further down on the site, David Bernstein, who is chair of George Mason's hiring committee (and a U.S. News voter), says it's the season for receiving reams of propaganda from the various schools trying to make a good impression - what is sometimes referred to as "law porn." After rifling through the material, he offers some reality checks:
--If you're going to brag about something, make sure it's something worth bragging about. He doesn't think much of a "low-ranked" school that mentioned having four former Supreme Court clerks on the faculty. "What could be more gauche?" he asks, noting that "Supreme Court clerks are overvalued in the academic market (though not as much as they used to be)."
--Don't include faculty members on your publication lists who haven't published anything outside a bar journal or a new edition of their casebook in a decade.
--Don't send alumni magazines. These are meant for alumni, and they typically focus on things alumni care about, not things that professors at other law schools care about.
--Don't address the brochure to "chair, faculty hiring committee" as opposed to actually finding out who the chair is, and addressing it personally. The former address gives away that the mailing is law porn, “and is therefore about 200 percent more likely to wind up in the trash bin, unread.”
--Don't focus on recent and upcoming endowed guest lectures. Any law school with enough money can get just about any professor to speak on just about any topic.
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| 03:01 PM Oct 19, 2007 | Email the Daily Dragon | Email this Article | Post Comments |
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