Because duh. Law schools are professional schools and we believe that obtaining a job as a lawyer is the whole point. (Except for Yale.)
So putting all this into the Excel spreadsheet blender, here are their top 10 schools:
- Yale
- Stanford
- Harvard
- Chicago
- Penn
- Duke
- UVA
- Columbia
- Berkeley
- NYU
I’m not enough of a student of the finer points of law school rankings to parse whether there are any headline surprises here, or in the other 40 ranked schools, but I would be surprised if there are not some material differences with that paleolithic ancestor, USNWR. (I hope so!)
Now, is everything perfection incarnate?
As a first start out of the box, it’s drop dead impressive. Yet if I know the folks at ATL well (and, disclosure, I do), they’ll never be satisfied. So what tweaks might they make next time?
- Obviously, one could question whey they ranked 50 schools and stopped there. I happen to think that’s actually an ingenious decision. Let’s not kid ourselves, people, are there really a lot more than 50 law schools that most people pay attention to? Whether 50 is the right cutoff or not reminds me of the ceaseless debate over whether 18 or 21 is the right age to be able to vote, drink, smoke, serve in the military, etc. Who knows, and at some level I fundamentally don’t care: What matters, and what we can all agree on, is that it’s not 12 and it’s not 30.
- Do SCOTUS clerkships and lifetime-tenured federal judgeships really deserve so much (or any) weight? I know they are “prestige” incarnate–not to mention more-than-decent outcomes in life for the lucky occupants–but the SCOTUS jobs may be unduly subject to allocation based on who you know and the federal judgeships based on whose campaigns you supported. (Never having pursued either one, this is blissfully uninformed by personal experience.)
- Conversely, if you join me in mild skepticism of putting specific, name-brand jobs onto the scales, what about other arguably more valuable jobs? If you asked me, I would immediately nominate “entrepreneur,” for example. Peter Thiel (Stanford, Stanford Law) co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook.
- I have a more philosophical observation, and it has to do (stay with me, folks) with the epistemological foundation of numerical rankings such as this. Before I explain, let me show you the “30’s” from this list:
30: Wake Forest
31: George Washington
32: U of Minnesota, Twin Cities
33: U of Illinois Law
34: William & Mary
35: U of Houston
36: Seton Hall
37: U of Iowa
38: Washington & Lee
39: Tulane
Here’s the point: What does it really mean to say that Chicago is better than Penn (by 0.40 points on a 100 point scale, by the way) or that Seton Hall is better than Iowa (by 0.10 points)? We may not just be pushing the limits of what we can know, but blasting right past them into distinctions without differences. To recur to the 18 vs 21 age cutoff debate, if you only get into NYU (in the “bottom” of the top 10) and Wake Forest (at the top of the 30’s), would anyone in their right mind not know what to do? But if you “only” get into Iowa and Tulane, or you “only” get into UVA and Columbia, it’s not so obvious, is it?
So maybe a “batched” ranking would actually be more sensible: Something like “Creme de la creme, really excellent, not half bad, OK, and do-not-pass-go” (this is ATL writing, in this thought experiment).
The counter-argument, of course, is that a Top 50 Law School Ranking is first and foremost a ranking. And not just because the hairsplitting is food for amusing cocktail hour debates (and bumps up page-view metrics), but more profoundly because we humans love comparisons. Winning Olympic gold by 0.01 second is still winning.
But we have passed a milestone: Never again will USNWR own the monopolist’s mindshare or wield the monopolist’s destructive, irrational, corrosive, and odious power. We are in the presence of Creative Destruction.
The King is Dead, Long Live the King.
I agree that the ATL ranking is a good effort. And I agree that Elie’s follow up post, discussing some of the criticisms, was an unusual display of forthrightness on the part of somebody making rankings. My criticism is that a number of the inputs are also quite easily subject to gaming. For example, the NLJ250 data isn’t an ideal proxy for employability (at least not at the top). That is, the NLJ250 ranking evaluates a placement at Cravath, Wachtell, or other similarly situated firms as equivalent to a placement at Adams and Reese. Not to suggest that Adams and Reese isn’t a great firm, but I think that few would suggest it’s in the same league as the others. Unfortunately, this is a feature that actually does have an effect at the top. At that level, I think that the relevant question is less about access to jobs as much as willingness to take certain jobs. The biggest outlier is, of course, Yale (comparatively few do biglaw), but the data underlying the NLJ250 ranking suggest that Penn students are actually willing to take firms a step down in prestige from, say, those that NYU students are willing to go to. So that’s a concern.
Batch rankings are the key. If you look, the scores tend to cluster anyways.
Also, you are completely on point with abandoning scholarships as a metric for ranking schools, but only insofar as it comes to choosing which school to attend. At that point, of course, you’ll already know which school gave a preferrable funding package. But it might influence the decision to apply to schools, given the cost of application (why apply to a school that I know I will not be able to afford?).
The biggest issue is the assumption that all NJ250 firms are equal, and that NJ250 firms + SCOTUS or federal judges are the only desirable rankings category. I agree with ATL that they need to draw the line somewhere, and that line should definitely be above “JD preferred,” but what about prestigious (according to ATL) programs like DOJ Honors, or generally desirable other federal honors attorney programs? No one goes to the DOJ because they didn’t get their first choice job at a big firm, unlike many JD-preferred positions.
What I would like to see is a report looking at the influence US News actually has in applications and enrollment. Are prospective law students making their choices based on the US News Rankings? I haven’t seen any studies on this topic.
Further graduate education in general is facing a crisis, not just law school. The legal community needs to look at the larger picture and outside their insular profession and see that many have faced or are facing similar problems. Collaboration to find a solution or reviewing ones that worked should be part of the solution method. Not just get a room or committee full of lawyers and law professors/school administrators together to come up with a solution. Having one economist is a mistake when a major portion of the crisis is about pricing. A committee of economists would be much better.