Legal Commentary

I'm at the ABA's mid-year meeting in Boston, and today I learned that some legal ethics types have been talking with Bob Morse of U.S. News about the possibility of adding an "ethics" component to the law school rankings.  It sounds like the conversation is at a very early stage, so specifics are lacking.  There was some suggestion that the component could be based on course offerings and whether there are required courses beyond PR, such as courses on professionalism or law office management. 

Count me, at least at this stage, among the skeptics.  I'm all in favor of serious institutional commitments to ethics and professional formation more broadly (a big reason why I came to St. Thomas), but I have no idea how such commitments could be quantified and compared in any meaningful way.  Course offerings will often reflect the interests of the faculty and student body, and whether a course is required may say as much about the deference the school gives to student choice as it does about a commitment to ethics.  If U.S. News was to look at the output side of the ledger, helpful benchmarks are also lacking.  For example, if the ranking was to incorporate the percentage of graduates subject to disciplinary proceedings, lower-ranked schools would be unduly penalized since clients of lawyers in small firms or solo practice utilize the disciplinary process much more frequently than clients of large firms.  Those numbers, I'm guessing, would also vary significantly by jurisdiction. 

Basing the rankings on reputation would be a little better, but not much.  If U.S. News surveyed the PR profs as to which schools are best in the field, there might be some meaningful divergence with the overall rankings,  (E.g, I'm guessing that Fordham and Georgetown would outperform their overall rankings, while Yale and Chicago would underperform.)  At the same time, PR folks will not necessarily know about (or care about) creative, non-traditional approaches to ethical formation that do not fit within the traditional PR framework, and I don't think the point of the rankings would be to measure which school is best in the academic field of professional responsibility.  

Am I missing something -- are there some criteria by which we could sensibly measure how seriously a school treats the "ethical" component of legal education?  (Let's put to the side, for the moment, the question of whether current criteria sensibly measure overall law school quality.)

[Cross-posted at Legal Ethics Forum.]