Legal News

Are the Editors at U.S. News Becoming De Facto Law School Deans?

By Dan Slater

An op-ed in today’s Hartford Courant suggests that the answer to the above question is yes. The piece goes on to lament what it views as law school deans’ double-talk about the U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of their schools, which were released on Friday. The piece was written by Michael Seringhaus, a One-L at Yale, which U.S. News ranked first for 2008.

Seringhaus feels that the strong reaction of several deans to their respective school’s drop in the rankings conflicts with a 2006 open letter in which deans cautioned “against relying upon numerical rankings and implored applicants to evaluate law schools holistically.”

Here’s the crux of Seringhaus’s argument:

To understand why law school rankings are so maddening to administrators, it helps to know why they are so unrealistic. Because each state administers its own bar exam, most law schools are regionally biased to some degree. A handful of top schools are considered national — meaning their graduates can and do find work in legal markets across the country — but at most schools, graduates often end up working in-state. . . . Ignoring this, U.S. News piles all schools into a single national ranking. This is misleading and unhelpful, since it encourages prospective students to weigh law schools as interchangeable commodities as opposed to entities with strong local ties.

Intrigued, we called Seringhaus, a Toronto native who, we discovered, received a PhD from Yale in molecular biophysics and biochemistry before heading on to law school. “You can say rankings help because they make deans focus on competing with other schools,” Seringhaus, who was on his way to class, told the Law Blog. “But the question is whether they’re giving students what they want, or should have, versus just doing things to skew rankings that don’t actually help students.”

He believes that what’s most important in the whole rankings debate isn’t the “tune changing” among the deans, but rather the failure to acknowledge that, “when you have a messy ranking system with a lot of uncertainty, moving from 22 to 23 doesn’t mean a lot. It’s just random fluctuation.”

What do you think, LB’ers? Have the rankings, a relatively new phenomenon compared to the ages of many law schools, created a mostly misguided competition among the schools and sent their deans on fools’ errands?

Update: Robert Morse, the director of data services at U.S. News, just sent along this message, via email:

U.S. News believes our law school rankings serve an important purpose which is to provide prospective law school students with comparative information on the relative merits of law schools. This data isn’t available to applicants from any other source. Prospective students should also take into account cost, location, course offerings and job opportunities. Applicants to law schools should only use the rankings as one tool to help them decide which law school to attend. The rankings should not be the only basis to choose to attend one law school over another.

U.S. News has been reading with great interest all the commentary, suggestions and critiques that have been written about our new law school rankings. U.S. News takes seriously what the law school community has said about how we can improve the rankings. U.S. News has a standing offer to meet informally or formally with law school deans and others to continue this discussion. U.S. News will write more about the law school rankings and what our next steps will be in the near future.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 31, 1969 (boomark / email).