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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

Judge Louis Pollak Slams US News Rankings, Offers An Alternative List

By Dan Filler

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Yesterday I noted the release of the first issue of the Drexel Law Review. What I didn't mention was that Judge Pollak, the Inaugural Chair of Drexel Law's Visiting Committee and former Dean of both Yale Law School and Penn Law School, has an article in this first issue offering some critiques of US News rankings. Among various comments, he offers up this thought:

I argue that any serious attempt to measure the quality of a law school should include inquiry into a dimension unmentioned, let alone unexamined, by U.S. News & World Report?namely, how recent and current law students feel about their alma mater. A major difficulty, of course, is that a useful inquiry would be very difficult to design and carry out. But the larger difficulty is that the findings, while very likely of real interest (most especially to college seniors deciding which law schools to apply to) would be unquantifiable.

Of course, we all know that law profs groove on rankings, even as they bitch relentlessly. And prospective students want information. Judge Pollak gets all that as well, and has ginned up his own version of law school rankings, a first cousin to the Brian Leiter and Paul Caron approaches. Pollak's list clusters similar schools solely along the peer assessment axis and relies on 2009 US News survey data. He concedes that it's "defective" and "very inadequate", but still "not quite as unmeritorious as the US News and World Report version." The Judge Pollak Rankings - which are suprisingly reasonable - after the jump...

All subgroup schools are listed alphabetically, because he sees no relevant distinction.

Group I Law Schools- (Peer assessment score 4.0 and above)

Subgroup A - Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Yale

Subgroup B - Berkeley, Michigan, NYU, Penn, Virginia

Subgroup C - UCLA, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Northwestern Texas

Group II Law Schools - (Peer assessment score 3.0 and above)

Subgroup A - GW, Iowa, Minnesota, UNC, Southern Cal, Vanderbilt, Wash U.

Subgroup B - BC, BU, UC Davis, Emory, Fordham, Hastings, Illinois, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Washington & Lee, Wisconsin

Subgroup C - American, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana (Bloomington), Tulane, Wake Forest, U. of Washington, William & Mary

Group III Law Schools - (Peer assessment score 2.0 and above)

Subgroup A - Alabama, Arizona St., Brigham Young, Brooklyn, Cardozo, Case, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Florida St., George Mason, Houston, IIT (Kent), Indiana (Indianapolis), Kansas, Loyola LA, Maryland, Miami, Missouri (Columbia), Maryland, Oregon, Pittsburgh, Rutgers (Newark and Camden), San Diego, Santa Clara, SMU, Temple, Tennessee, Utah, Villanova

(Check the remainder in the article...the list gets long.)

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).