Legal Commentary

For the last two weeks, I have been blogging about the annual U.S. News survey of law professors, lawyers, and judges, and how we might use that survey to create a real race to the top in legal education. On Thursday, I offered a sample "Voters' Guide" to the U.S. News survey that focused specifically on what I called the "super-elite market" -- the schools from which the very best law students can choose, and which also happen to be the top three in the U.S. News rankings: Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.

Two things have occurred to me since, though, that caused me to rethink the precise definition of this market. One is that I got a lot of interesting reactions to my posts, with one common reaction coming from my terrific colleague and friend, Christian Turner. Before joining us in the great red state of Georgia, Turner was the president of the Stanford Law Review, and then lived in this old, hollowed-out industrial town in Connecticut for a few years where he worked for a firm with lots of Yale grads, and also clerked for a man who is a federal appellate judge by day, and a legendary Torts professor at Yale... also by day, and whose first name, if I'm recalling correctly, rhymes with "Speedo". So Turner has a unique perspective on all this, and made the point that there can be different kinds of schools for different kinds of students with different kinds of goals, and that's probably a good thing. None of which I disagree with.

Implicit in this is the idea that not everyone who goes to a top school wants to go work at Cravath or Skadden right afterwards, and if they're lucky enough to not be in as much debt as some of their colleagues, maybe they won't have to. So let's think about such prospective law students: superstars at elite colleges and universities, theoretical bent, not sure whether they want to practice law but might for a while, might well want to be a law professor someday, gee it would be great to clerk on the Supreme Court. A few college friends who ended up going to Yale come to mind. So I started thinking: if someone like that were to ask my advice on where to go to law school, what would I say?

The other thing is, I started thinking about Brian Leiter again, as I often do (note to wife: time to consult a divorce lawyer), and I thought: what would Leiter think of my super-elite market definition? I don't think my alma mater, Columbia, or NYU has enough of the intellectual students I'm talking about, and Northwestern seems to increasingly be marketing itself as the elite training ground for business lawyers. I think Northwestern's efforts are terrific, but it doesn''t get them into this super-elite club. It did occur to me, though, that Leiter might think I'm leaving someone out, and that just might be a smallish private school -- like Yale and Stanford -- in the neighborhood of Hyde Park and the city of Chicago.

So how does the University of Chicago compare? It's got the superstar faculty, intense intellectual atmosphere, top students. Are the students engaged and satisfied with the education there? Now I've acknowledged that Stanford's high student satisfaction ratings might be a product of better weather, sunnier outlook in Palo Alto as compared to New Haven. But the weather ain't so great in Chicago either, as I understand it, and the environment is pretty intense there, and yet the Chicago students' feelings about the teaching there are, shall we say, much closer to Stanford, and highly distinguishable from Yale.

Princeton Review survey (scale from 60 to 99) says:
Stanford: Professors Interesting: 98. Professors Accessible: 97.
Chicago: Professors Interesting: 99. Professors Accessible: 90.
Harvard: Professors Interesting: 82. Professors Accessible: 63.
Yale: Professors Interesting: 69. Professors Accessible: 67.

So what would I say to the superstar, theoretically-inclined prospective law student? That Yale is at best the third choice for aspiring Supreme Court clerk/law professors, behind Stanford and Chicago, and unless you take a lot of clinical credits, you are not going to get much "value added" to prepare you to practice law either, relative to the education you'd get at other institutions.

Remind me, fellow law professors, lawyers and judges, why do we keep ranking Yale the No. 1 law school in America? Yes, they have a darn good faculty in terms of scholarly productivity and impact -- is the faculty that much better than Stanford and Chicago such that their education can be worse, and they still get a "5" in the rankings survey?

It's time for a change. Vote "3" (max) for Yale in November's U.S. News survey. Because we're competitive, gosh darn it, even though we're supposed to be more collaborative, and so it's not OK that the Carnegie Foundation studied legal education as part of a comparative study of professional education that has also been looking at the training of doctors, nurses, clergy, and engineers, and concluded that -- well, they put it more nicely than this but -- we kind of suck.

Because it's time to send a message that law schools need to do a better job of educating lawyers. And we can send that message and create a race to the top on educational quality by rewarding those law schools who really add value for students, and punishing those who don't. As one well-known Hyde Park resident says, "Yes we can." And with your help, yes we will.