Legal Commentary

As you may have seen over on Brian Leiter's blog, there's a new study of faculty productivity that was produced by Professor Yelnosky at Roger Williams Law School. The study measures the scholarly productivity of professors at law schools ranked outside the top 50 of USNews. To my delight, Florida State ranks third, trailing a bit behind USanDiego and Cardozo. Richmond is not far behind FSU. San Diego warrants mention for being just a point and a half behind Harvard. (NB: When Brian did a similar study of the "top" schools, FSU ranked 31st nationally; Cardozo and USanDiego tied at 22d. I'd be very curious to see what the numbers look like today.)  The study's methodology is pretty interesting and probably somewhat controversial insofar as it measures productivity by focusing on how much scholarship gets selected for publication in the "top" journals. Yelsnosky explains that 67 journals were deemed "top":

We included the general law reviews published by the 54 schools receiving the highest peer assessment scores in the 2008 U.S. NEWS RANKINGS (47 schools had a peer assessment score of 2.9 or higher; 7 had a score of 2.8) and an additional 13 journals that appear in the top 50 of the Washington & Lee Law Journal Combined Rankings. An alphabetical listing of those journals can be found on this website, as can the U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT RANKINGS and Washington & Lee Law Journal Combined Rankings on which that list of 67 journals is based.

For those of you making decisions about which journals to send your stuff, your deans will be especially happy if you place in these ones, rather than other ones you might be tempted by. This study, consequently, might create certain feedback loops. Another important aspect of how this was measured includes the deduction of points for articles published in journals in one's home institution and for articles that are short:

For each qualifying article, we used Professor Leiter?s system: 0 points for articles under 6 pages; 1 point for articles 6-20 pages in length; 2 points for articles 21-50 pages in length; and 3 points for articles exceeding 50 pages. For articles appearing in a journal published by the faculty member?s home institution, the points assigned were reduced by one-half. The total number of points for all members of a faculty was divided by the number of faculty, yielding the institution?s per capita score.

Given the limited ambition of what the study purports to measure, I'm not sure I have too many quibbles with its design. I can imagine that faculties with lots of legal historians (UNC?) or other specialties might suffer under this metric. And if I had my druthers, I'd probably deduct all (not just half the) points for publication in a journal belonging to one's home institution. 

By the way, Brian remarks: "For those on the law teaching market, this study is not a bad tool for gauging which more regional law schools have serious scholarly culture." Indeed, but the point should dig deeper: the study also raises the question of which of the top 50 law schools don't have a "serious scholarly culture," at least comparatively and based on this metric. Unfortunately, we don't have enough data for that determination; actually, I'm a bit surprised that Yelnosky didn't undertake that. In light of the already substantial work that was involved, I wonder how much more work it would have been to include the rest. In any event Yelnosky deserves thanks for putting this together and if your school was not measured by Yelnosky but you've done a self-study to mimic it, please feel free to share that info in the comments. Of course, if you're on the market this year, you may want to ask the schools you're meeting with about how they fare or at least what they think of the study--but probably best to do so after you get an offer!