In light of the recent corrections to Gregory Sisk et al.'s "Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties: Extending the Leiter Rankings to the Top 70," I've gone back and correlated their important data with the US News peer assessment numbers and a few key student characteristics -- like the 75th and 25th percentile of LSAT scores for entering students, as well as student faculty ratio and bar pass rate. I've also added citations to each school's primary law journal (2002-09), which I've taken from John Doyle's fabulous Washington and Lee Law Library website.
It should come as no surprise that a lot of those variables are highly correlated. While Sisk et al. find some significant outliers -- schools like St. Thomas, whose faculty citation rank is well above their school's US News peer assessment rank -- there is a high correlation (.8) between the US News peer assessment scores and the Sisk data. The Sisk weighted score correlates .85 (Spearman rho = .74) with journal citations.
Important as citations are as a measure of a law journals’s influence and, as I believe, a reflection of a school’s scholarly environment (and here), the Leiter-Sisk weighted score is a more direct measure of the scholarship and scholarly impact of a faculty. The weighted score of many schools seems generally consistent with variables employed by ABA and USNews and included in the accompanying matrix, but the weighted score provides a perspective on some schools that the other measures do not. I hope to post some more on the faculties that are performing significantly differently from their US New peer assessment scores soon.
The new correlation matrix incorporates the Sisk et al. corrections. It, thus, supersedes the matrix in my post on this last week and the post on correlations of Sisk weighted scores and citations to law schools' main law reviews.
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