Pairwise comparison ranking of the "top 40" law schools in terms of faculty quality, 2023

I had to close the poll on Friday after Professor Kerr at Berkeley (innocently!) linked to it on Twitter; he has more than 100,000 Twitter followers, which would have brought in all kinds of random voters from cyberspace, which would undermine the scientific credibility of the results, needless to say.  Anywhere, here are the "top 40" according to some 400 voters and more than 50,000 comparisons.  Despite the dubious method, it's amazing how much more sensible this is than US News!  (The number in parentheses indicates how many comparisons out of 100 the school prevails in--understand comparisons like Harvard vs. Stanford turn up pretty rarely!)

1.  Harvard University (95)

2.  Yale University (91)

3.  University of Chicago (89)

4.  Stanford University (88)

5.  Columbia University (87)

5.  New York University (87)

7.  University of California, Berkeley (86)

8.  University of Pennsylvania (84)

9.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (83)

9.  University of Virginia (83)

11. Duke University (76)

12. Cornell University (74)

13. Georgetown University (73)

13. University of California, Los Angeles (73)

15. Northwestern University (72)

16. University of Texas, Austin (69)

17. Vanderbilt University (68)

18. University of Southern California (67)

Then there's a noticeable gap in scores after the top 18:

19.  Washington University, St. Louis (57)

20.  Boston University (56)

21.  University of California, Irvine (55)

21.  University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul (55)

23.  Fordham University (54)

23.  George Washington University (54)

25.  Emory University (53)

26.  University of Notre Dame (51)

27.  University of Wisconsin, Madison (48)

28.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (47)

29.  University of California, Davis (45)

30.  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (44)

31.  Florida State University (43)

31.  University of Iowa (43)

33.  Boston College (42)

34.  College of William & Mary (41)

34.  Ohio State University (41)

36.  Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University (39)

36.  University of Colorado, Boulder (39)

36.  University of San Diego (39)

39.  University of California, San Francisco (formerly Hastings) (37)

39.  University of Washington, Seattle (37)

Although this is more sensible than USNews.com, there are still some odd results.  Florida State, for example, has a very good faculty--it is one of those "regional" law schools with a national scholarly reputation--but it is not better than most of the other schools in the top 40.  NYU seems to me, pretty clearly, to have a stronger faculty than Stanford these days; Penn is very good, but not better than Virginia; Brooklyn and George Mason should have been in the top 40; and so on.  These are quibbles.  Certainly those seeking law teaching jobs can learn more about the scholarly caliber of the faculty they might join from these results than from USNews.com.