Super Lawyers Rankings and Law School Size

Following up on Dan Filler's post on the Super Lawyers Rankings (as modified by Dean Van Zandt of Northwestern) and correcting for size of JD institution, I thought that I'd take a quick look at the rankings and their relationship to the size of the law school.  The short answer is that the top quarter of schools in the Super Lawyers Rankings have more students (mean = 965) than the 2nd quarter (mean=757), which have more students than the third quarter (mean=688), which have more students than the final quarter (mean=568).  Thus, it is clear that average rank varies with enrollment.  On average, schools with larger JD enrollments have lower ranks (that is, they have more graduates in the "Super Lawyers" category).  (The enrollment data come from the most recent LSAC Official Guide.)

Overall, the Spearman rank-order correlation between enrollment and Super Lawyers rank for all law schools included in the Super Lawyers survey is -.51 (N=180, p<.0001).

But, the relationship differs within the four quarters of the Super Lawyers rank.   The correlation in the top quarter is like that in the total group.  But there is essentially no relationship in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, where enrollment is less variable, and there is a non-significant trend toward the opposite direction in the bottom quarter.

Here's a pdf version of a couple of tables, which help illustrate what I've just described.

If you're interested in my more considered thoughts on rankings (and in particular how law review citations can be used to bring some more precision to rankings), check out this paper.

Update: Brian Leiter's prepared a list of the top 15 schools, correcting for current class size.

Comments

[Joe]

This is a really complicated explanation of what should be a simple statistical analysis.

[Joe]

There is an argument that bigger is better. Bigger schools have bigger alumni networks, graduates have more networking opportunities, etc. Adjusting for class size is not obviously right and really hurts big schools like Georgetown. Really, it depends on where you want to work. If you want to work on Wall Street, go to Harvard or Yale. If you want to work in DC, Georgetown. If you want to work in Tallahassee, go to University of Florida. If you want to work in Maui, go to University of Hawaii. These one-size-fit-all rankings have limited value. If you are really smart, don't go to law school.