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Sneak Peek at Law School Rankings

"Across American law schools, you can hear the loud sucking sound of academic productivity being flushed down the drain today," writes Joe Hodnicki at Law Librarian Blog. What he is referring to is this sneak peek at the U.S. News ranking of the top 100 law schools, posted by Dan Markel at PrawfsBlawg. Meanwhile, Brian R. Leiter offers his own deconstruction of the rankings, calling the U.S. News ranking methodology "baroque and indefensible and prone to gaming." But one component of the survey, Leiter suggests, "has some relationship to reality and ... can't be manipulated by the schools" -- its reputational surveys. He writes:

"Jeffrey Stake (Law, Indiana-Bloomington) has shown that the reputational survey of academics is increasingly an 'echo chamber' reflecting the overall U.S. News rank.  Still, the effect isn't (yet, anyway) absolute, and the academic reputation results still tend to be a bit closer to 'common wisdom' among informed academics than the overall rankings."

Leiter sets out those reputational rankings in his post and then continues his analysis with another post today, comparing how schools' reputation rank compares to their overall U.S. News rank.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on March 30, 2006 at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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