Legal Commentary

Having just finished my third year at the University of Georgia, I'm very much looking forward to the prospect of getting tenure.  For one reason only.  Because if I'm lucky enough for it to happen, I will be a "most recently tenured" and therefore be eligible to vote for the US news rankings.

This is a big responsibility, I know.  I want to be a responsible citizen of the greater law school community, and frankly, I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the debates about the US News rankings.  People seem to think it's screwed up, Leiter's got his thing, that's about all I know -- it does not affect my life much.  But that might change.  Sure, it's a few years away, but I'd better get ready.

So I went to the U.S. News site to see what I'm supposed to be voting on.  It says here in Question #10 that we're supposed to rank from 1-5 the "quality" of the "program" for each school.  As far as I can tell, that's the only guidance and criteria we get.  Please, someone, who has actually done this before or has a copy of the questionnaire itself -- tell me we get more help than that.    Bob Morse, U.S. News's methodology czar, are you out there?  Can you help?

If that's all we get to go on -- evaluate the quality of each school's "program" -- what criteria are we supposed to use?  As I see it, law schools have two fairly distinct "programs" -- the production of knowledge, and educating future lawyers.  Which one should we evaluate?  Both, and weight each program 50-50? How do we know? I'll take a  first stab at this in the next post, but would welcome thoughts in the meantime.