Anna is keeping me awake at this hour in the morning, so I figure I might as well put in a few lines on the topic of law school ranking.

The ranking of law schools has always been a controversial topic, and will remain so in the foreseeable future. Some fight over the smallest discrepancies while others dismiss the validity of any ranking entirely. There are quite a few well-known published rankings, with the U.S. News Ranking of Law Schools being the most recognized (and thus most controversial) one. Others include the Brian Leiter ranking of faculty quality as well as the ones used by Leiter in his ranking comparison.

My take on the issue? Take the ranking as what it is — just a ranking. To law school applicants, a typical reader of the ranking, there is no “one-size-fits-all” ordering of the schools that will suit everyone’s needs and preferences. In fact, my own preferences for schools shifted during the application process as I read more about each school and visited some. Besides, U.S. New’s idea of computing a school’s “comprehensive score” using a formula that assigns arbitrary weight to non-relevant factors (e.g. faculty/student ratio, admission rate, etc) simply doesn’t make much sense to me. As a prospective law student, I care most about 1. faculty strength, 2. program depth and breadth, 3. quality of life. Unfortunately none of them can be measured by a numerical score. For example, if sun-bathing in a Stanford bikini (do they make those?) in Palo Alto gets a 10 in quality of life score, is freezing one’s arse off in Ann Arbor a 6.5 or 4.8? What about living across from the ghetto in New Haven?

If the U.S. News ranking still has some value to it, then it is the “reputation scores” from its surveys collected from law school deans and lawyers/judges. Arguably these “reputation scores” are a good approximation of the long term perceived quality of faculty strength at each school, so of all the factors used by U.S. New’s formula, the “reputation score” is the only one that’s relevant. (Of course the U.S. News wouldn’t admit to this fact。 Reputation scores stay relatively stable over a long time — What fun and excitement is left if they used only the reputation score to rank law schools, only to find out that the rankings come out the same each year. Plus, they won’t be able to sell many copies of the ranking if it always stays the same.)

Anyway, so here’s the REAL ranking, ordered by reputation a.k.a. prestige, based on my limited (mis)information. Schools listed in square brackets are about the same in terms of quality and prestige. Distinguishing them further is splitting hairs and pointless. This is particularly true to a prospective Chinese law student, which I believe many of my readers are. The market for J.D.s back home hasn’t evolved into a nitpicking one that obsesses over the infinitesimal difference in school prestige… at least not yet.

[Yale]
[Harvard] ~small gap~ [Stanford]
[Chicago, Columbia]
[NYU]
[Michigan, Virginia] ~small gap~ [Berkeley, Penn]
==this completes the top 10, commonly seen as YHS|CCN|MVBP==
==interestingly, this largely corroborates with the U.S. News reputation scores==
[Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, Georgetown]
==this completes the top 14

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Again, precise numerical ranking of any educational institution is pointless. I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post had it not been for the interesting discovery presented here: http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2005/05/puzzle-of-penn-law-schools-ranking.html and here: http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2005/05/gory-details-by-demand.html, in which the author discussed the abnormality in Penn’s #7 rank. In his model, which is claimed to be “reverse-engineered” from the unelaborated U.S. New’s formula, Penn would have been ranked #14. Some commenters went over his calculations and found some errors, and I estimated that, after adjustment for the errors, Penn would have ranked #9 or #10, which is inline with my list above. Exactly how did the U.S. News manage to rank Penn at #7 (or NYU above Chicago – although I <3 NYU), is a mystery, like its ranking formula and the ranking itself.

For what it’s worth, I think the following schools in the first tier are underrated in the U.S. News ranking. ND, OSU, Tulane, BYU. Overrated: GMU, GWU, Fordham, BU. Perhaps the U.S. News has a stronger East Coast preference than I do?

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