Over at TaxProf Blog, Paul Caron has taken the two components of US News that most folks think have some merit – the peer assessment survey number (reputation among academics) and the lawyer/judge assessment number. He notes that the overall US News scoring incorporates peer assessment as 25% of the total and lawyer/judge assessment as 15%. Extrapolating, Paul creates what he titles the 2010 US News Quality Assessment Ratings. These rankings are based exclusively on survey scores, weighting peer numbers 62.5% and lawyer/judge numbers as 37.5%. The overall rankings are a tad different than the overall US News numbers. Some interesting stuff:
Northwestern tumbles from #10 to #15
North Carolina rockets from #30 to #20
GW soars from #28 to #21
Wisconsin rises from #35 to #26
BU sinks from #20 to #29
Bama drops from #30 to #43
And there's plenty more. The biggest benefit of this particular re-ranking is that it exposes the role of all of the other non-reputational factors in determining a law school's overall US News position.
Someone had some fun with the thesaurus tonight…
How reliable do people suppose the Judge/practitioner rankings are? My guess would be that many of them are based mostly on prior rankings (top schools get top rankings, baring any bad experience with graduates), local schools are ranked in a way that has some value as evidence, and all the others are largely garbage, even more so than the faculty rankings. (Outside the top 50 or so I don't have that much faith in the faculty rankings, either.) I guess that if there is a wide enough dispersion of responders this "local bias" might wash out, but I'm skeptical. Of course, what judges and lawyers think about various law schools is important and useful information for students, but I just doubt that it has much value outside of a local area most of the time, and that's not what we get from the USNews ranking, or one that uses the judge/practitioner ranking.