Legal Commentary

Brian Leiter recently linked to this ranking by Daniel Solove of law schools by the percentage of their graduates seeking teaching jobs who successfully land one.  After noting the lack of success of Cornell's graduates on the teaching market, Leiter goes on to say the following:

The relatively poor performance of Cornell and Penn grads is rather startling, especially given the comparatively large number of graduates trying to get teaching jobs--my guess is there were a lot of students misled by U.S. News in choosing where to go to law school.

Ouch.  At the risk of seeming defensive, I wanted to step in to defend Cornell (and Penn) on this.  Leiter's comment strongly suggests that something about Penn and Cornell explains why our candidates did not get jobs and that had they not been misled by U.S. News and gone to, say, Tulane or Vanderbilt, both of which have had a higher number of their graduates successfully land teaching jobs, they would have done better.  But the ranking provides very little evidence to support this  conclusion.

First, on the most superficial level, I've been involved with appointments at both Fordham and Cornell.  And at neither institution has the school from which a candidate graduated, by itself, played anything more than the slightest role.  I assume we are not atypical in this respect.  When screening resumes, we note the school a person graduated from, but it doesn't really generate a strong presumption one way or the other.  If anything, it's sort of a one-way screen -- someone from a second-tier law school will need to do more to show that they are a viable candidate, but they are certainly not ruled out solely on the basis for their alma mater.   Far more significant are things like publications, prestigious clerkships, advanced degrees, etc. 

The one way that schools may have some effect on the success of their graduates is by directly supporting their efforts on the teaching market.  Some schools do this by offering their graduates generous fellowships, etc., while they prepare to go on the market, or by encouraging their students to write during their time in law school, or by offering advice to their students about how to succeed in the entry-level market, or, finally, by aggressively pushing their graduates through resume books and  recommendations from their faculty members.  My sense is that these are practices that are more prevalent at places like Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Chicago,  which generate a significant percentage of the successful entry-level candidates each year.  Are the schools ranked below Cornell on U.S. News who have done better in the entry-level sweepstakes during the two years covered by this ranking doing things like this?   Perhaps, but the ranking by itself doesn't tell us that, or really anything else about why graduates of those schools have had more success on the teaching market than Cornell's or Penn's.

More importantly, I'm just not sure how much of an impact many of these efforts actually have.  If we took the typical Yale candidate and sent him/her through Cornell or Penn, it's not obvious to me that s/he would end up doing much worse on the entry level market as a result. The failure of Solove's ranking to sort through these sorts of things is not so much an indictment of his efforts or of the ranking itself as it is a caution not to hang too much on it.  But Brian's comment -- suggesting that students interested in teaching would do well not to come to Cornell or Penn -- seems to do just that.  There are many reasons to be dubious of U.S. News rankings, and Brian has done a great job of pointing them out in other instances.  I just don't think this is one of them.