62 Law Schools Boycotted The U.S. News Law School Rankings

Law.com, 63 Law Schools Boycotted US News Law School Rankings:

While 42 law schools publicly announced plans to boycott the U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools” rankings, a total of 63 law schools ended up not submitting data for the survey.

On the embargoed release, due out Thursday, U.S. News provided an asterisk next to schools with a footnote stating: “School declined to report law data to U.S. News during U.S. News’s most recent data collection. The school’s rankings and rankings data were derived entirely from information the school publicly disclosed as mandated by the American Bar Association, and data collected from reputational surveys.”

American

Appalachian

Barry

Brooklyn

Cal-Western

Campbell

Capital

Columbia

Connecticut

Cornell

Creighton

Detroit Mercy

Duke

Florida A&M

Georgetown

Gonzaga

Harvard

Idaho

Inter-American (PR)

John Marshall (GA)

Loyola-Chicago

Loyola-New Orleans

Maryland

Michigan

Mitchell | Hamline

Nebraska

New Hampshire

North Carolina Central

Northeastern

Northwestern

NYU

Penn

Penn State-Dickinson

Penn State-University Park

Pittsburgh

Pontifical Catholic (PR)

Puerto Rico

Quinnipiac

Roger Williams

Rutgers

San Francisco

Seattle

South Texas

Southern

Southwestern

St. John's

Stanford

Syracuse

Texas Southern

Touro

Tulane

UC-Berkeley

UC-Davis

UC-Irvine

UCLA

UC-San Francisco

University of Washington

Vanderbilt

Virginia

Western Michigan

Wisconsin

Yale

Cornell Law School had announced in November that it would not boycott the rankings.

Jens David Ohlin, Allan R. Tessler Dean of Cornell Law School, posted a statement on the school’s website on Nov. 23, saying, “[W]ithdrawal from the rankings process will not have the desired impact that many assume that it will have.”

However, U.S. News indicated the law school did not submit data.

The law school sent the following statement to Law.com on Wednesday: “Cornell Law School did not publicly announce a ‘boycott’ of the U.S. News rankings but instead called for a deeper conversation about the role rankings play in legal education. The U.S. News then announced that it would not use any data submitted by schools in the ranking methodology but would instead rely on public data that is published through the ABA disclosure process. Consequently, the U.S. News school data submission process is now irrelevant for the construction of the rankings.”

In the reverse, US News marked Fordham Law School, which had publicly announced a boycott, as having submitted data. A spokesperson for the school, however, said that it only submitted publicly available data, as it had planned to do.

Of the 63 schools who did not submit data to U.S. News, a majority were either in the top 19 (15 boycotted) or in the lowest portion of the rankings (17 boycotted), according to the U.S. News survey released to law schools on Monday.

Thirteen of the T14 schools did not submit data, with only the University of Chicago Law School continuing to participate.

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