Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Why Did Loyola Law School Fall in US News? Because the Magazine Changed the School's Name, and Its Reputation Score Plunged!

This really takes the cake for carelessness on the part of U.S. News.  Loyola Law School in Los Angeles dropped from 63 to 71 in the overall U.S. News ranking this past spring, and for one primary reason:  its reputation score among academics dropped from 2.6 to 2.3.  But that kind of drop is extraordinary:  the academic reputation scores move .1 in either direction all the time, without rhyme or reason, but only once in the last eight years did another school's peer reputation score drop that much.  (The lawyer/judge reputation scores used to fluctuate more wildly, because the response rate was so low; U.S. News this year decided to average two years' worth of these reputation scores to make the results less [meaninglessly] volatile.)

So with only a 1 in 1,000 chance of this kind of movement, what else might explain the precipitous drop in academic reputation?  Unfortunately, the explanation seems to be clear:  U.S. News unilaterally changed the school's name on the survey:  from "Loyola Law School" to "Loyola Marymount University."  Loyola was the only school whose name was changed on last year's survey.

As the Loyola Dean wrote to his colleagues: 

While we are part of Loyola Marymount University, and proud of it, we have been known as Loyola Law School for 80 years.  That name has been used in all our branding efforts.  Most law school professors and deans know us by that name.   We use that name consistently in an effort to avoid confusion with two other schools that have “Loyola” in their names.  By changing what we are called on the survey ballot, the magazine may have confused some respondents.   

This is almost certainly the explanation--I have never in all my time in teaching ever heard the school called anything other than "Loyola Law School" or "Loyola Law School, Los Angeles".  Pretty ridiculous!   One assumes US News will fix the mistake next year.

Since you really wanted to know which blogs by law professors had the most traffic,

Blog Emperor Caron will tell you.  But he omits the key statistic:  average visit length!  Could it be because mine is generally one minute thirty seconds, and his is only thirty seconds?   Eat your heart out, Paul!

US News to Rank Law Firms

No kidding.  It won't have much impact, however, since there are already multiple, established ranking sources (American Lawyer and Vault primarily), and it's less clear who the target audience will be:  clients, current and prospective won't care, they have far more meaningful criteria to employ in evaluating law firms; perhaps law students considering job offers, though U.S. News's timing, given the state of the legal market, isn't, shall we say, ideal; and perhaps navel-gazing lawyers.

More Fun with SSRN Downloads

Here, covering schools ranked by US News in the low 20s to 100.  Since it's the boring dog days of summer, and Inspired by Professor Crawford, here's how the US News "top 15" ranks according to gross SSRN downloads.  The next column reports the number of authors listed on SSRN, excluding those who had no downloads in the last year.  Per capita is the total downloads in the last year divided by the number of authors.   The last two columns are self-explanatory.  I have not corrected for prospective moves (Sunstein is in government service [but on leave from Harvard], Black & Litvak are going from Texas to Northwestern, Fried is going from Berkeley to Harvard, Triantis is still listed with UVA, though he is now full-time at Harvard, etc.).

Rank	School	Total Downloads	# of Authors	Per Capita Downloads (rank by per capita downloads)	Top 3 Authors (Downloads)	% of Total Due to Top 3
1	Harvard Law School	107,591	154	699 (2nd)	L. Bebchuk (23, 416), C. Sunstein (12, 413), V. Wadhwa (9,050)	41%
2	University of Chicago Law School	50,899	68	749 (1st)	B. Leiter (8,823), E. Posner (8,126), D. Evans (4,935)	43%
3	Columbia Law School	44,590	98	455 (5th)	J. Coffee (5,631), R. Gilson (4,751), T. Wu (4,468)	34%
4	New York University School of Law	39,943	139	287 (12th)	M. Kahan (3,558), S. Choi (3,327), S. Chesterman (3,193)	25%
5	Yale Law School	38,997	104	375 (8th)	D. Kahan (3,910), J. Balkin (3,467), R. Romano (3,377)	28%
6	University of Pennsylvania Law School	34,194	73	468 (4th)	D. Skeel (4,872), P. Robinson (3,288), E. Rock (2,788)	32%
7	University of California, Los Angeles School of Law	34,038	80	426 (6th)	S. Bainbridge (8,468), L. Stout (2,746), K. Raustiala (2,348)	46%
8	University of California, Berkeley School of Law	31,855	87	366 (9th)	J. Fried (4,084), P. Menell (3,821), J. Yoo (2,382)	32%
9	Stanford Law School	31,305	99	316 (10th)	M. Lemley (10,152), R. Gilson (4,751), A. Sykes (1,464)	52%
10	Georgetown University Law Center	30,048	97	310 (11th)	W. Bratton (3,236), A. Levitin (2,225), P. Schrag (2,101)	25%
11	University of Texas School of Law	29,781	61	488 (3rd)	B. Black (13,597), H. Hu (3,507), K. Litvak (1,634)	63%
12	Duke University Law School	26,550	66	402 (7th)	S. Schwarcz (10,685), M. Gulati (2,843), R. Michaels (1, 120)	55%
13	University of Michigan Law School	22,364	81	276 (13th)	R. Avi-Yonah (3,494), J. Hines (2,265), A. Pritchard (1,456)	32%
14	Northwestern University School of Law	18,668	77	242 (15th)	A.  D’Amato (1,666), S. Calabresi (1,221), J. McGinnis (1,147)	22%
15	Cornell Law School	14,373	58	248 (14th)	T. Eisenberg (2,309), B. Frischmann (1,644), J. Rachlinski (1, 364)	37%
16	University of Virginia School of Law	12,842	74	174 (16th)	C. Sprigman (1,396), P. Mahoney (962), G. Triantis (958)	26%

More Thoughts on Philosophers Influential in Legal Scholarship

Responding toour earlier survey, David Luban (Georgetown) writes with some interesting observations:

Your poll of the most influential philosophers on law faculties was interesting, in part because it raises questions about what kind of influence we are thinking of and which faculties. 

As for the former question:  given the extraordinary number of law professors who think of themselves as utilitarians or classical liberals, Mill must IN FACT be the most influential even among law profs who have never read a word of Mill - provided we count indirect influence.  And surely we should, because otherwise it's hard to see how Kant could have wound up as #1.  How many law profs actually read Kant or have beaten their brains out over the transcendental deduction?  The influence must be indirect:  law profs think of Kant as the source of non-utilitarian thinking about rights.  Ergo, Kant is influential.  This sort of influence will not show up in citation counts.  Conversely, some philosophers will show up in citation counts merely as a footnote to a sound bite.  For example, a quick Lexis search on "wittgenstein w/10 language game or language-game" gets 125 hits.  Most appear simply to be isolated uses of the phrase, without any sign that the author is actually a Wittgensteinian in any robust sense.  So too, "adam smith w/10 invisible hand" gets 445 hits.

As for the latter question, about which faculties:  I found myself placing Aristotle and Aquinas high on the list because there must be a lot of Catholic law schools where the Thomistic influence lingers even if recent decades have seen their faculties become far more secular.

Thoughts from other readers?  Please post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

Even if the US News Ranking Formula Makes No Sense,

a news magazine, with investigative reporters on its staff, ought to do some fact-checking!

UPDATE:  Salil Mehra writes:

I realize that you probably meant your post today to convey some degree of hyperbole.  But I wanted to point out that, as important as USNews unfortunately is in the law school world, there has been little or no commentary in the law school world on the fact that since they are no longer a newsweekly like Time or Newsweek, or even a news biweekly, but have shifted to be a monthly "lifestyle and rankings" publication, they may not actually have many real reporters left.  They should've taken some sort of credibility hit.  After all, BusinessWeek ranks business schools, but also covers the business world in depth every week!

This is news to me, and clearly is relevant to evaluating the rankings the magazine produces.  It would also explain howlers like the one discussed in the IHE piece linked above.

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Journalists May be the Dumbest People on the Face of the Earth, Part 361

Someone just sent me this item from the California Lawyer by a "reporter" named Lawrence Hurley.  I can't recall ever having spoken to Mr. Hurley, but if I did, he just made some things up anyway:

University of Chicago Law School professor Brian Leiter hates U.S. News and World Report's law school rankings. The influential rankings, published every March, suffer from a flawed methodology, according to Leiter: They fail to emphasize the importance of teaching.

This is absurd, and I'm sure I never said it.  U.S. News has a flawed methodology--that's obvious--but the flaw has nothing to do with failure to take account of teaching, which can't be very meaningfully measured or compared.  (Princeton Review tried, and it's better than nothing, maybe, but not much.)

Leiter got so annoyed with the magazine's approach that in 2005 he started his own rankings system. He relies on fellow law professors' input about the quality of faculty and future job prospects for graduates. "U.S. News needs more competition," Leiter says.

U.S. News does need more competition, but I first produced a set of law school rankings a dozen years ago, and they were featured on the front page of the National Law Journal at the time.  Only the current ranking site started in 2005.

Robert J. Morse, U.S. News and World Report's director of data and research, responds wearily. "[Leiter's] no better than us, but he thinks he is."

Since this is inconsistent with anything Mr. Morse has ever said, I'm going to assume this is just more fiction-writing by the "reporter."  Whatever the merits and flaws of the metrics I have used, they, quite obviously, suffer from none of the flaws of the U.S. News methods:  mine can't be gamed, the data is real, and there is no inexplicable weighting of multiple factors to produce an overall nonsense number.

The Most Important Legal Thinkers in American Law of the Past Century

UPDATE:  Comments are now open (sorry about that).

With 180 votes cast, here are the top 25:

1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Richard Posner  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 63–47

3. Ronald Dworkin  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 67–46, loses to Richard Posner by 67–51

4. Ronald Coase  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 61–40, loses to Ronald Dworkin by 54–53

5. Benjamin Cardozo  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 65–29, loses to Ronald Coase by 50–48

6. Louis D. Brandeis  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 69–22, loses to Benjamin Cardozo by 40–39

7. Karl N. Llewellyn  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 65–29, loses to Louis D. Brandeis by 46–44

8. Guido Calabresi  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 75–31, loses to Karl N. Llewellyn by 57–39

9. John Hart Ely  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 68–22, loses to Guido Calabresi by 56–38

10. Antonin Scalia  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 76–22, loses to John Hart Ely by 48–41

11. Alexander Bickel  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 71–17, loses to Antonin Scalia by 48–37

12. Cass R. Sunstein  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 79–18, loses to Alexander Bickel by 46–40

13. Richard Epstein  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 78–23, loses to Cass R. Sunstein by 47–42

14. William J. Brennan, Jr.  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 75–21, loses to Richard Epstein by 44–43

15. Henry M. Hart, Jr.  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 77–13, loses to William J. Brennan, Jr. by 46–33

16. Lon Fuller  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 72–20, loses to William J. Brennan, Jr. by 44–35

17. Laurence H. Tribe  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 76–18, loses to Lon Fuller by 46–34

18. Catharine A. MacKinnon  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 76–19, loses to Laurence H. Tribe by 44–37

19. Felix Frankfurter  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 81–11, loses to Lon Fuller by 41–28

20. Roscoe Pound  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 75–11, loses to Felix Frankfurter by 34–33

21. Bruce Ackerman  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 79–18, loses to Catharine A. MacKinnon by 44–39

22. Herbert Wechsler  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 75–12, loses to Bruce Ackerman by 35–33

23. Frank Easterbrook  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 80–14, loses to Herbert Wechsler by 37–28

24. John Henry Wigmore  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 77–9, loses to Frank Easterbrook by 36–30

25. John Marshall Harlan II  loses to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. by 77–11, loses to John Henry Wigmore by 29–26

Martha Nussbaum and Robert Bork were very close to making the top 25 as well.

What to say about the results?  Would Hugo Black and Learned Hand--wrongly omitted from the original list of 75 choices--have made the top 25?  Probably.  I am personally surprised MacKinnon was not higher, so too Llewelly and Fuller and Wechsler.  I was surprised by Ely's strong showing:  Demoracy and Distrust was a very fine bit of constitutional theory, but what else is there?  The top three seem right, including Dworkin, whose jurisprudential views may be a tissue of confusions and misrepresentations, but whose vision of constitutional adjudication in particular has been hugely influential on legal thought (if not on U.S. courts).  (I have yet to find a constitutional theorist who takes him- or herself to be "influenced" by Dworkin who realizes that nothing in the bits and pieces of Dworkin they find important is at issue in Dworkin's purported dispute with legal positivism.  Fortunately for Dworkin's influence, jurisprudential ignorance is deep and widespread!) 

Here are the three law faculties that can claim the most scholars from the above list as faculty members for some significant portion of time:

University of Chicago (Posner, Coase, Llewellyn, Scalia, Sunstein, Epstein, Easterbrook, Nussbaum)

Harvard University (Ely, Sunstein [started last year, now on leave], Hart, Fuller, Tribe, Frankfurter, Pound)

Yale University (Dworkin, Calabresi, Ely, Bickel, Ackerman, Bork)

Columbia University (Llewellyn, Wechsler)

New York University (Dworkin, and Epstein starts part-time in 2010)

Thoughts from readers?  Signed comments only:   full name and e-mail address.  Post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

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