Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

San Francisco City Attorney subpoenas USNews.com over its hospital rankings...

...suspecting conflicts of interest, and USNews.com sues claiming violation of its First Amendment right to mislead consumers (OK, they left out the "mislead consumers" part).  As we've noted before, prevailing in a lawsuit against USNews.com would be difficult.

Texas A&M grads have highest bar pass rate in Texas

That's quite an achievement; the Texas Wesleyan school, which A&M took over and transformed starting only a decade ago, was regularly in the bottom half of Texas schools for bar passage rate.

USNew.com changed its meaningless formula for the college rankings significantly this year...

...and lawprof Derek Muller (Notre Dame) speculates about whether this portends further changes to the law school rankings.  I'll just note that in the 1990s, US News (back when they were still an actual magazine, not a website) used to include average starting salaries of graduates, but then dropped that since it had more to do with geography (e.g., does a school place mostly in the NYC area?) than with the success of the school or its graduates.

Which law school has the strongest scholarly faculty?

It's that time of year for another amusing Internet poll:  pairwise comparisons of the "top 40" law faculties.  More than 60 choices.  Have fun!

14 lateral moves that made law professors "take notice" during 2022-23

Based on my in-box and conversations with others, these were 14 moves that transpired this past year that were thought to be the biggest hiring coups (I usually list only ten, but this was another big year for lateral moves):

 

*Derek Bambauer (intellectual property, law & technology) from the University of Arizona to the University of Florida, Gainesville.

 

*Jane Bambauer (First Amendment, law & technology, privacy) from University of Arizona to University of Florida, Gainesville.

 

*Robert Bartlett III (corporate) from the University of California, Berkeley to Stanford University.

 

 

*Colleen Chien (intellectual property, law & technology) from Santa Clara University to the University of California, Berkeley.

 

 

*Dhammika Dharmapala (tax, corporate, law & economics, empirical legal studies) from the University of Chicago to the University of California, Berkeley.

 

*Michele Goodwin (health law, constitutional law) from the University of California, Irvine to Georgetown University.

 

*Ran Hirschl (comparative constitutional law) from the University of Texas, Austin back to the University of Toronto.

 

*Timothy Holbrook (intellectual property, property) from Emory University to the University of Denver

 

*Kevin Quinn (empirical legal studies) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Political Science) to Emory University (Law School & Political Science).

 

*Daria Roithmayr (constitutional law, Critical Race Theory) from the University of Southern California to the University of Colorado, Boulder.

 

*Sarath Sanga (corporate, contracts) from Northwestern University to Yale University.

 

*Gregory Shaffer (international law, international trade) from the University of California, Irvine to Georgetown University.

 

*Maya Steinitz (arbitration, international business transactions) from University of Iowa to Boston University.

Given the new (inexplicable) USNews.com ranking stew...

...Derek Muller (Iowa) predicts what next year's ranking will look like.  There is always the possibility that the reputational scores will fluctuate (arbitrarily), but my guess is this won't be far off what the 2024 rankings look like!  Note some of the dramatic changes predicted!

Why did Yale's academic reputation score plunge from (tied for) 3rd to (tied for) 6th this year?

Was it because Yale led the charge on the boycott of USNews.com?  Was it the accumulated effect of various embarrassing events, from judges boycotting Yale over free expression issues to the Amy Chua melodrama?  Was it a reflection of a widely perceived decline in the strength of Yale's younger faculty compared to their elders?   Was it all of these?  What's clear is the drop this year was pretty dramatic by historical standards for USNews.com reputation surveys, and of course this year is way down from a decade or so ago when Yale was usually tied for 1st or 2nd in academic reputation.

More on the new USNews.com ranking stew

Prof. Derek Muller (Iowa) breaks it down.   Basically, the editors chose to downgrade the importance of "input" metrics (like LSAT and GPA), and dramatically increase the weight for output measures (like bar passage and employment), which now count for more than 50% of the overall score.  In a way, this is salutary, since it will incentivize schools to improve those metrics (or fudge more aggressively!).  The whole formula still of course makes no sense, and is inexplicable in terms of the weightings.  What is clear is that the results are even more detached from traditional criteria of excellence, like faculty quality.  The rankings will also now be much more volatile, for reasons Professor Muller explains.

USNews.com has outdone itself: it has made its law school rankings even more absurd than before!

There's not much to say about what is essentially a random ordering of law schools within tier groups.  Any student who made a decision on the basis of small (and, in some cases, even large) ordinal differences in this year's travesty really should have a cause of action against USNews.com.  (Some of the swings in overall rank are beyond bizarre!  UC Davis and Arizona dropped from the top 50?  Emory and George Washington dropped out of the top 30?  Is this a joke?)   I won't belabor the obvious, and will just repost an updated version of something I posted a year ago.  If anyone extends it beyond "the top 10," please let me know.

US News overall rank	School	Overall scholarly impact rank	Scholarly impact rank for faculty under 60	SCOTUS “per capita” placement rank	Academic reputation rank in US News	Avg. rank across the last four metrics [rank]
1	Stanford University	6	10	3	1	5 [5]
1	Yale University	1	3	1	6	2.75 [3]
3	University of Chicago	2	1	2	3	2 [1]
4	University of Pennsylvania	8	14	15	9	11.5 [outside top 10]
5	Duke University	12	8	9	11	10 [10]
5	Harvard University	3	2	3	2	2 [1]
5	New York University	4	5	5	3	4.25 [4]
8	Columbia University	5	9	9	3	6.5 [6]
8	University of Virginia	9	5	5	9	7.0 [7]
10	Northwestern University	15	17	9	12	13.25 [outside top 10]
10	University of California, Berkeley	6	7	9	6	7.0 [7]
10	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	13	13	5	6	9.25 [9]

 

Did USNews.com miscalculate employment rates or did the schools misinterpret the data reported?

Derek Muller argues, plausibly, it was the latter.