The U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores, 1998-2022

Robert L. Jones (Northern Illinois), After Twenty-Five Years, Academic Reputation Scores for Law Schools Remain Below Their 1998 Levels:

This Article summarizes the results of the U.S. News & World Report rankings published in 2021 and 2022 with respect to the academic reputation scores of law schools. In addition to analyzing the most recent results for the U.S. News rankings, the Article supplements the more extensive longitudinal study published by this author in 2013 [A Longitudinal Analysis of the U.S. News Academic Reputation Scores Between 1998 and 2013, 40 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. (2013)]. The Article also includes updated appendices from the prior study that catalog the U.S. News academic reputation scores for every law school between 1998 and 2022. ...

[O]nly twenty-one law schools have managed to improve their academic reputation scores by .3 or more during the twenty-five year period between 1998 and 2022. That represents a mere 12.4% of the data set. Table 2 (below) lists this relatively small subset of schools in the data set that have succeeded in raising their scores significantly over the studied period.