New Student Ranking of Law Schools

Following up on last week's launch of our new Leiter's Law School Rankings web site (blogged here):  The Record, the independent student weekly at Harvard Law School, has surveyed HLS students to "identify and rank what [they] believe to be the ten best American law schools."  The editors note:

To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first and only study to explore the perceptions of law students at a particular law school on such a large scale as well as the first and only study to trace variations across 1L, 2L, and 3Ls classes as well as compare the opinions of JD students with those of LLMs.

• No Inferiority Complex in Cambridge: Students Rank HLS First in The Record's Study
• LLMs vs. JDs on HLS vs. Yale

Without further ado, here are the students' top 15 law schools, as well as how their rankings compare with the other rankings compiled in our forthcoming article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. ___ (2005) (Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings), as updated to reflect new rankings:

Top 15 Law Schools By Various Measures
School	Reputation			Publications			Impact
	HLS	USNews	Leiter	L&S	Leiter	SSRN	E&W	Leiter	SSRN
Harvard	1	2	2	2	3	1	1	3	2
Yale	2	1	1	4	1	15	2	2	12
Stanford	3	3	4	9	3	4	3	4	3
Columbia	4	4	5	8	3	8	7	7	4
Chicago	5	6	2	1	1	2	4	1	1
NYU	6	5	5	11	7	12	5	6	15
Michigan	7	8	8	16	10	17	8	13	19
Penn	8	7	11	13	14	5	17	21	16
Berkeley	9	11	7	7	6	9	9	5	9
Virginia	10	8	10	6	14	11	11	13	10
Georgetown	11	14	12	5	18	10	6	8	7
Cornell	12	11	14	14	16	24	13	11	27
Duke	13	11	17	23	21	25	16	9	23
Northwestern	14	10	14	10	12	31	13	12	31
UCLA	15	15	14	17	13	3	12	15	5
Texas	15	15	8	3	7	17	10	9	6

Reputation:

• HLS = Harvard Law School Student Survey
• US News = 2006 U.S. News Overall Ranking
• Leiter = 2003-04 Faculty Quality Rankings: Scholarly Reputation

Publications:

• L&S = James Lindgren & Daniel Seltzer, The Most Prolific Law Professors and Faculty, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 781 (1996)
• Leiter = 2000-02 Faculty Quality Rankings: Scholarly Productivity
• SSRN = Top Law Schools -- Total Papers (April 2005)

Impact:

• E&W = Theodore Eisenberg & Martin Wells, Rankings and Explaining the Scholarly Impact of Law Schools, 27 J. Legal Studies 373 (1998)
• Leiter = 2005 Faculty Quality Rankings:  Scholarly Impact (Citations)
• SSRN = Top Law Schools -- Total Downloads (April 2005)

Note that the Harvard Law students' rankings exhibit the same phenomenon we first observed in our Moneyball article, What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Texas L. Rev. 1483, 1524 n.235 (2004):  Harvard ranks higher under their methodology (#1) than it does under the U.S. News measure they use for comparison purposes (#2 in the overall U.S. News ranking).  We noted that the ranker's school inevitably ranks higher under the ranker's methodology than it does under the U.S. News peer reputation ranking (chart updated to include new rankings):

Rank of Rankers’ Law School
Ranker	Ranker’s School	US News’ Rank	Ranker’s Rank
Black & Caron	Texas/Cincinnati	15/72	6/66
Brennan & LeDuc	Thomas Cooley	175	29
Eisenberg & Wells	Cornell	11	6
Ellman	Arizona State	43	7
Leiter	Texas	15	8
Lindgren & Seltzer	Chicago-Kent	61	22
Stake	Indiana	33	29

We noted in our Moneyball piece that we of course don't allege any intentional bias in any of these rankings.  Indeed, we rely extensively on the Eisenberg & Wells, Leiter, and Lindgren & Seltzer studies in our SSRN rankings article and greatly respect their methodologies and findings.

The Record rightly seeks to inject law student voices into the rankings picture.  At our symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings, Patrick T. O’Day & George D. Kuh explained how The Law School Survey of Student Engagement can systematically add student input to the evaluation of law schools.  Their paper, A New Approach to Measuring Law School Quality: The Law School Survey of Student Engagement, is forthcoming in 81 Ind. L.J. ___ (2005):

[T]he LSSSE survey offers a student-centered approach for assessing the “value added” of the law school educational experience by determining the extent to which JD students engage in good educational practices. ...The information comes directly from currently enrolled students. More than 34,000 law students from 74 law schools completed the LSSSE survey online in spring 2004 and 2005. The students represent a broad cross-section of JD students from across the country. Because all JD students are surveyed by an independent survey research organization, the results are reliable, comparable, meaningful, and credible. LSSSE findings provide insights into student behaviors and law school environments that can be addressed almost immediately to enhance student learning and law school effectiveness. Law schools already are using LSSSE results at faculty retreats and board meetings to focus discussions about the quality of legal education, to inform internal academic reviews, and to identify areas of teaching and learning where improvement may be desired.