More than 150 leading law professors evaluate nearly six dozen law schools
AUSTIN, Texas – Professor Brian Leiter, author of the well-known “Educational Quality Ranking (EQR) of U.S. Law Schools,” today released the results of a nationwide survey of more than 150 leading law professors evaluating faculty quality at sixty-nine major law schools. According to Professor Leiter, “There has never before been an evaluation of law faculty quality undertaken by so many distinguished legal scholars, both junior and senior, and based on such current information about faculty rosters.” The full results and a detailed explanation of methodology, and how it differs from U.S. News, is available here: http://www.leiterrankings.com/
Evaluators included both the President and President-elect of the Association of American Law Schools (Georgetown’s Mark Tushnet and Texas’s Gerald Torres, respsectively); roughly a dozen members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the nation’s most prestigious learned society, including Judge Richard A. Posner, Columbia’s John C. Coffee, Jr., Chicago’s Dean Saul Levmore, Berkeley’s Daniel Farber and Yale’s Roberta Romano; the three most-cited young legal scholars in the United States (Columbia’s Michael Dorf, Berkeley’s Mark A. Lemley, and UCLA’s Eugene Volokh); and leading scholars from Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, Virginia, Texas, Michigan, Cornell, Northwestern, Duke, Penn, Georgetown, UCLA, Southern California and many other major law schools. For a complete list of evaluators, see Appendix A at the ranking site, above.
Evaluators were presented with current faculty rosters for 69 law schools that had some claim to be among the nation’s top 40. Evaluators were not able to evaluate their own institution or the institution from which they graduated. In addition to evaluating “the overall intellectual quality and scholarly accomplishments” of the faculty, evaluators were asked for their expert opinion on any one of 11 different areas of legal scholarship in which the evaluator was a specialist.
Among the significant findings:
(1) The most notable change from a generation ago is that NYU is now squarely among the top five law faculties in the United States (along with Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, and Columbia), having displaced Michigan (which is now tied for 8th with Texas). In addition, Berkeley (7th) has displaced Michigan as the leading state-supported law faculty. In addition, Southern California is now squarely in the top ranks of American law faculties (at 12th), having displaced Duke (now 17th).
(2) Five relatively young law schools—all, consequently, with more regional reputations--in fact have put together law faculties that rank solidly among the top 40 in the United States: they are University of San Diego (22nd), George Mason University (26th), Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University (28th), Chicago-Kent College of Law/Illinois Institute of Technology (37th), and Rutgers University, Camden (37th),.
(3) U.S. News rankings based on “academic reputation” noticeably understate actual faculty quality at not only the five schools noted in (2), above, but also the faculties at University of Chicago (4th in U.S. News, 2nd in the EQR survey), NYU (8th in U.S. News, 5th in the EQR survey), Texas (12th in U.S. News, 8th in the EQR survey), University of Southern California (18th in U.S. News, 12th in the EQR survey), Boston University (25th in U.S. News, 19th in the EQR survey), and Fordham University (36th in U.S. News, 26th in the EQR survey). There appear to be two main reasons for these differences: first, U.S. News provides evaluators with no information about the schools being evaluated; and second, U.S. News makes no effort to survey active scholars, those most likely to have informed views about faculty quality.
(4) In the specialty rankings, three schools are #1 in three different specialty
areas: Harvard, NYU, and Yale. Harvard is in the “top five” in 9 different
specialty areas, followed by NYU (“top five” in 7 different areas), Yale (“top
five” in 8 different areas), Chicago and Columbia (“top five” in 6 areas each),
Stanford (“top five” in 5 areas), and Georgetown, Penn and Texas (“top five”
in 4 areas each).