It should come as no surprise that Gregory Sisk and company's latest study, "Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties: Extending the Leiter Rankings to the Top 70" has received something on the order of 570 downloads since yesterday morning when I downloaded a copy. No surprise at all. This has all the makin's of something every law faculty member will read. The virtue of writing on rankings is that it appeals across the spectrum; you reach tax professors and critical race scholars and everyone in between.
Among their important findings are that faculty at some schools -- including their own University of St. Thomas -- are performing substantially above their schools' US News peer assessment ranking.
I've done some very preliminary comparison of 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. This 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 the school's US News peer assessment rank -- there is a high correlation (.8) between the US News peer assessment scores and the Sisk citation data. The correlation matrix is here.
Shortly I hope to have some comparison of Sisk's data to my favorite data set: citations to schools' main law reviews.
Final thought here: Sisk is the Orestes Brownson professor. I study Orestes Brownson (though I'm more interested in the Transcendalist Brownson than the Catholic Brownson). I've taken G.P.A. Healy's portrait of Orestes Brownson from our friends at wikipedia.
h/t Brian Leiter. And more discussion by Michael Heise here.
Update at of September 21: In light of a few changes to Sisk's data, I have a new matrix here.
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