The folks at Roger Williams have completed the study of scholarly productivity for which they were soliciting feedback a couple of weeks ago. They studied all schools in the 3rd and 4th tiers of U.S. News, plus (for comparative purposes) local schools in New England (Roger Williams is in Rhode Island).
The results are, I think, interesting, and provide useful information, especially for prospective law professors, about which schools outside the "elite" ranks maintain an institutional culture conducive to scholarly work. The results also by and large comport with my own, admittedly anecdotal, impressions of the faculties that are well-ranked.
UPDATE: Professor Eric Mitnick, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, writes:
Your post on the Roger Williams productivity study, and Dean Yelnosky's study itself, is misleading in one respect. It is not a study of all law faculties in the Third and Fourth tiers of the US News rankings. Instead, the study excludes schools that are not members of AALS.
For what it’s worth, following Dean Yelnosky's methodology strictly, I determined that the faculty at Thomas Jefferson would have had a score of 2.78, ranking us 15th among the schools included in the study.
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