SMU Law Review Volume 60 Issue 2 Article 6 2007 Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings Theodore P. Seto Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr Recommended Citation Theodore P. Seto, Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings, 60 SMU L. REV. 493 (2007) https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol60/iss2/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at SMU Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in SMU Law Review by an authorized administrator of SMU Scholar. For more information, please visit http://digitalrepository.smu.edu. UNDERSTANDING THE U.S. NEws LAW SCHOOL RANKINGS Theodore P. Seto* UCH has been written on whether law schools can or should be ranked and on the U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT ("U.S. NEWS") rankings in particular.' Indeed, in 1997, one hundred *Professor, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. The author is very grateful for the comments, too numerous to mention, given in response to his SSRN postings. He wants to give particular thanks to his wife, Professor Sande Buhai, for her patience in bearing with the unique agonies of numerical analysis. 1. See, e.g., Michael Ariens, Law School Brandingand the Future of Legal Education, 34 ST. MARY'S L. J. 301 (2003); Arthur Austin, The Postmodern Buzz in Law School Rank- ings, 27 VT. L. REv. 49 (2002); Scott Baker et al., The Rat Race as an Information-Forcing Device, 81 IND. L. J. 53 (2006); Mitchell Berger, Why the U.S. News & World Report Law School Rankings Are Both Useful and Important, 51 J. LEGAL EDUC. 487 (2001); Bernard S. Black & Paul L. Caron, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Per- formance, 81 IND. L. J. 83 (2006); Paul L. Caron & Rafael Gely, Dead Poets and Academic Progenitors,81 IND. L. J. 1 (2006); Paul D. Carrington, On Ranking: A Response to Mitch- ell Berger, 53 J. LEGAL EDUc. 301 (2003); Terry Carter, Rankled by the Rankings, 84 A.B.A. J. 46 (1998); Ronald A. Cass, So, Why Do You Want To Be a Lawyer? What the ABA, the AALS, and U.S. News Don't Know That We Do, 31 U. TOE. L. REV. 573 (2000); Francine Cullari, Law School Rankings Fail to Account for All Factors, 81 MICH. Bus. L. J. 52 (2002); Lawrence A. Cunningham, Scholarly Profit Margins: Reflections on the Web, 81 IND. L. J. 271 (2006); R. Lawrence Dessem, U.S. News U.: Or, the Fighting Volunteer Hur- ricanes, 52 J. LEGAL EDUC. 468 (2002); Theodore Eisenberg, Assessing the SSRN-Based Law School Rankings, 81 IND. L. J. 285 (2006); Theodore Eisenberg & Martin T. Wells, Ranking and Explaining the Scholarly Impact of Law Schools, 27 J. LEGAL ST-mD. 373 (1998); Rafael Gely, Segmented Rankings for Segmented Markets, 81 IND. L. J. 293 (2006); Tracey E. George, An Empirical Study of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools, 81 IND. L. J. 141 (2006); Joanna L. Grossman, Feminist Law Journals and the Rankings Conundrum, 12 COLUM. J. GENDER & L. 522 (2003); William D. Henderson & Andrew P. Morriss, Student Quality as Measured by LSAT Scores: Migration Patterns in the U.S. News Rankings Era, 81 IND. L. J. 163 (2006); Alex M. Johnson, Jr., The Destruction of the Holistic Approach to Admissions: The Pernicious Effects of Rankings, 81 IND. L. J. 309 (2006); Sam Kamin, How the Blogs Saved Law School: Why a Diversity of Voices Will Undermine the U.S. News & World Report Rankings, 81 IND. L. J. 375 (2006); Russell Korobkin, Harnessingthe Positive Power of Rankings: A Response to Posner and Sunstein, 81 IND. L. J. 35 (2006); Russell Korobkin, In Praise of Law School Rankings: Solutions to Coordination and Collective Action Problems, 77 TEX. L. REV. 403 (1998); Brian Leiter, How to Rank Law Schools, 81 IND. L. J. 47 (2006); Brian Leiter, Measuring the Academic Distinction of Law Faculties, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 451 (2000); Mark Lemley, Rank, 3 GREEN BAG 2 D 457 (2000); James Lindgren & Daniel Seltzer, The Most Prolific Law Professors and Faculties,71 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 781 (1996). Prof. Tom W. Bell has blogged extensively about his model of the U.S. News law school rankings. See, e.g., Reforming the USN&WR Law School Rankings, http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2006/08/reforming-usnwr-law- school-rankings.html (Aug. 9, 1006, 15:34 EST). To date, however, he has not made his model publicly available. See also Richard S. Markovits, The ProfessionalAssessment of Legal Academics: On the Shift from EvaluatorJudgment to Market Evaluations, 48 J. LE- GAL EDUC. 417 (1998); Rachel F. Moran, Of Rankings and Regulation: Are the U.S. News SMU LAW REVIEW [Vol. 60 fifty law school deans took the unusual step of signing a joint letter con- demning the U.S. News rankings. 2 The following year, the Association of American Law Schools commissioned a study by Drs. Stephen Klein and Laura Hamilton (the "Klein-Hamilton report") calling the U.S. News rankings' validity into question.3 Nevertheless, U.S. News has continued to compute and publish its rankings. This Article focuses on U.S. News's special issue entitled America's Best GraduateSchools published in spring 2006, posted online as "America's Best Graduate Schools 2007" 4 (the "2007 issue"). U.S. News's staff confirms, however, that its methodology has not changed in any respect in the past year. 5 While some of the num- bers may have changed, therefore, the Article's analysis applies equally to the "2008" rankings issued on March 30, 2007. Like many law professors, I have long found the U.S. News rankings perplexing. Although I generally focus on the school at which I teach- Loyola Law School, Los Angeles-and its ranking competitors, the na- ture of my difficulties is better illustrated by U.S. News's 2007 ranking of three of America's best-known law schools: Yale (ranked 1st), Stanford (ranked 2nd), and Harvard (ranked 3rd).6 As a Harvard graduate, I con- fess bias. I also want to assure readers that I hold both Yale and Stanford in very high regard. Nevertheless, I suggest that even impartial observers might perceive a need for further justification of U.S. News's bottom line with respect to these schools. Consider the following Harvard-Stanford statistics. About 58% of Harvard's students had Law School Admission Test scores (LSATs) of & World Report Rankings Really a Subversive Voice in Legal Education?, 81 IND. L. J. 383 (2006); Richard Morgan, Law School Rankings, 13-JUL NEV. LAW. 36 (2005); Patrick T. O'Day & George D. Kuh, Assessing What Matters in Law School: The Law School Survey of Student Engagement, 81 IND. L. J. 401 (2006); Richard A. Posner, Law School Rankings, 81 IND. L. J. 13 (2006); Nancy B. Rapoport, Eating Our Cake and Having It, Too: Why Real Change is So Difficult in Law Schools, 81 IND. L. J. 359 (2006); Nancy B. Rapoport, Ratings, Not Rankings: Why U.S. News & World Report Shouldn't Want to be Compared to Time and Newsweek-or The New Yorker, 60 OHIO ST. L. J. 1097 (1999); Michael Sauder & Wendy Nelson Espeland, Strength in Numbers? The Advantages of Multiple Rankings, 81 IND. L. J. 205 (2006); Michael E. Solimine, Status Seeking and the Allure and Limits of Law School Rankings, 81 IND. L. J. 299 (2006); Jeffrey Evans Stake, The Interplay Between Law School Rankings, Reputations, and Resource Allocation: Ways Rankings Mislead, 81 IND. L. J. 229 (2006); Cass R. Sunstein, Ranking Law Schools: A Market Test?, 81 IND. L. J. 25 (2006); David A. Thomas, The Law School Rankings Are Harmful Deceptions: A Response to Those Who Praisethe Rankings and Suggestions for a Better Approach to Eval- uating Law Schools, 40 Hous. L. REV. 419 (2003); David C. Yamada, Same Old, Same Old: Law School Rankings and the Affirmation of Hierarchy, 31 SUFFOLK U. L. REv. 249 (1997). 2. Russell Korobkin, In Praise of Law School Rankings: Solutions to Coordination and Collective Action Problems, 77 TEX. L. REv. 403, 403 (1998). 3. See Stephen P. Klein & Laura Hamilton, The Validity of the U.S. News & World Report Ranking of ABA Law Schools, Feb. 18, 1998, http://www.aals.org/reports/validity. html. 4. See America's Best Graduate 2007 Edition, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, Apr. 2006, at 44-47, available at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/law/awindex _brief.php. 5. Telephone Interview with Mr. Samuel Flanigan, Deputy Director of Data Re- search, U.S. News & World Report (Mar. 30, 2007). 6. America's Best Graduate Schools, supra note 4, at 44. 2007] Law School Rankings 172 or higher; in absolute numbers, about 980 students.7 Harvard's law library-the heart of any research institution-was without peer.8 Legal academics ranked Harvard with Yale as the best school in the country. 9 Stanford, by contrast, reported that only about 25% of its much smaller student body had LSATs of 172 or higher; in absolute numbers, about 130 students (about 13% as many as Harvard).10 Its law library was about one-quarter the size of Harvard's-indeed, it was smaller than the library at the school at which I teach.11 Consistent with these objective indica- tors, legal academics ranked Stanford lower than Harvard; judges and lawyers ranked them the same.12 Yet U.S. News ranked Stanford over Harvard.13 "Why?," I wondered. And what might that mean about U.S. News's relative ranking of less well-known schools? U.S.