« Snyder: Underplaying the Race Card | Main | Agent Orange: Gone But Not Forgotten »

Best Schools for Aspiring Law Profs

Are you an aspiring law student hoping for a career in the lucrative and rewarding field of law professorship? Then Yale Law School may be for you. According to Brian Leiter's ranking of the top producers of new law teachers, 2003-2007, Yale was first in graduates who went on to teach law, at least on a "per capita" basis that weighed the total number of placements against the typical class size. At 86, Yale sent fewer graduates into teaching jobs than did Harvard Law School with 101, but when considered in light of Yale's typical class size of 200 versus Harvard's of 550, Yale earned a per capita score of .43, much higher than second-place Harvard's .18.

Other launchpads to careers in legal scholarship include Stanford, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York University, Berkeley and the University of Virginia. When ranked purely by placement, without adjusting for class size, Harvard and Yale swap places as first and second, followed by Columbia (39), NYU (33), Stanford and Chicago (each 29).

To further fuel this ranking frenzy, Joe Hodnicki at Law Librarian Blog took this latest Leiter ranking of law professor placements, added in Leiter's earlier ranking of law faculties based on scholarly impact, and then lined it all up against the U.S. News & World Report 2008 rankings of the best law schools, to produce this chart: A Jury of One's Peers: Ranking Law School Reputations.

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on March 20, 2008 at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comments

Post a comment