Green Bag's Deadwood Report

This morning's insidehighereducation brings the news that the Green Bag will be starting an alternative to US News: the "deadwood report."  What is that going to be? According to insidehighereducation:

Law schools, the editors write, “generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to teaching, scholarship, and service.” They argue that the best teachers tend to be active scholars and vice versa, “and all the best lawyers of every stripe engage in service for the public good.... Evidence of the law schools’ commitment to this view is reflected in the practically universal requirement of high achievement in all three areas for tenure. And so we should be able to say with some confidence that a good law school will have a faculty consisting of hard-working teacher-scholar-humanitarians,” the Green Bag editorial says.

“The Deadwood Report will simply test the accuracy of that picture,” the journal’s editors write. “Our focus will be on the most dully objective of measures: whether the work is being done — whether each law school faculty member is teaching courses, publishing scholarly works, and performing pro bono service.” (The journal plans to start with teaching and research, turning only eventually to service, and notes that it does not plan — “at least not yet” — to answer what it calls the “trickier and more entertaining subjective questions: whether the teaching is effective, whether the scholarship is sound, whether the service is in the public interest.")

I'll be interested to see how this is operationalized.  You can read the editorial of Green Bag's editor, Professor Ross Davies of George Mason Law School, "Fair Warning to Law Schools ... and an Invitation to 1Ls, 2Ls & 3Ls," here.  The "invitation to law students" part--it's an invitation for students to take a high resolution picture of faculty who attend graduation.

We're all going to be talking about this for a while, I have no doubt. 

Comments

[Bradford]

I wish someone would do a meta-analysis of the various law school rankings available. Something along the lines of MetaCritic (www.metacritic.com) or the RealClearPolics average polling numbers (E.g. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/national.html).

I think this kind of error-canceling methodology would be very useful for the interested parties, none of whom would individually (rationally) invest the time necessary to crunch the data.