Legal Commentary

The recent blogosphere discussion of the Green Bag's forthcoming so-called Deadwood Report, which by and large has been favorable, is no substitute for reading the editors' introductory report itself.  Strip away your preconceptions -- including the assumptions that "more" "information" is always "better," that anything must be better than US News, and so on -- and read the report.  Consider its claims.  Consider its proposed methodology.  Make up your own minds about it.

My own view, to be perfectly blunt about it, is almost entirely unfavorable.  The Green Bag editors had the kernel of a good idea.  It could have been presented with a due sense of its limitations; with a reasonable humility of spirit; with an appropriate warning that "objective" measures are only as good as what they purport to measure, and that the choice of what to measure is not itself necessarily objective.  It could have reminded us of the essential fact that not everything worth measuring is objectively measurable, and not everything objectively measurable is worth measuring.  The editors could have acknowledged that what they dismissively call the "tricky" questions -- "whether [a law school's] teaching is effective, whether the scholarship is sound, whether the service is in the public interest, and the like" -- may in fact be the most important ones.  Instead, their idea has been tarted up and sent strutting onto the public stage in an editorial voice that reads like an unfortunate combination of P.T. Barnum, Sammy Glick, Franz Joseph Gall, Nancy Mitford, and Eddie Haskell.

The editors and their defenders set out to disarm or co-opt their expected critics by acknowledging that there may be some "grumbling" about methodology, but saying that "we are trying to do some good here."  They let themselves off too lightly.  It is not just that the methodology is seriously flawed -- which it is.  It is that there are a variety of serious mismatches between what the report says it is doing and what it is actually doing.

I certainly do not want to align myself with the forces of darkness.  I certainly agree that it is a fine thing for law schools to supply more, and more accurate, information about their doings.  I acknowledge that the Green Bag editors are doing something toward this end.  But one should keep in mind that rankings of this sort are supposed to aid you in making meaningful qualitative judgments about the "quality" of law schools and their faculty -- not to substitute for independent judgments of this kind.  I fear that this is exactly what items like the Deadwood Report, wrapped up as they are in a pseudo-scientific appeal to "objectivity," will do.

I certainly don't suggest that law schools keep their heads in the sand.  But I encourage everyone to read the editors' introduction for themselves, and to read the subsequent "Deadwood Report" with its obvious and serious limitations in mind.  Keep in mind that, given its flawed methodology and questionable underlying assumptions, it is not a serious measure of "the relative quality of law schools," as it purports to be. 

Keep in mind that even the very word "deadwood" is inaccurate.  What the report will actually measure -- as the editors fairly clearly admit in the subsequent story in Inside Higher Ed -- is the accuracy of online self-promotion efforts by law faculties.  That's a narrow but great thing to measure, and we could have been grateful to the Green Bag editors for doing just that.  But that's not what the editors claim to be offering in their report, and Lord knows it's not how the thing will be used.  How unfortunate that a report that offers itself up as an attack on law school puffery and deceptive marketing tactics offers up so much more of what it purports to condemn.