I know that Brian Leiter was just having some fun with his internet poll on the top 40 law schools, (with the final results -- what one might call "the definitive ranking of the top 40 law schools, 2010 edition" here) but I figured that I'd compare the results of the Leiter poll with the Sisk data (and some other standbys -- the US News peer assessment and lawyer/judge scores and the Washington and Lee Law Library citations study, a/k/a the Doyle data).
So....
Variable1 Variable 2 r rho N
Leiter study Sisk study .70 .77 40
Leiter study Peer 2011 -.96 -.97 39
Leiter study Law/J 2011 -.91 -.90 39
Leiter study Journ02-09 -.81 -.84 39
Sisk study Peer 2011 -.74 -.81 39
Sisk study Law/J 2011 -.66 -.75 39
Sisk study Journ02-09 -.68 -.75 39
Peer 2011 Law/J 2011 .96 .93 39
Peer 2011 Journ02-09 .85 .85 39
Law/J 2011 Journ02-09 .81 .84 39
r = Pearson correlation, rho = Spearman rank-order correlation
All correlations are significant (p < .0001). N is 39 rather than 40 for most correlations because data for California-Irvine are available only for Leiter ranks and Sisk ranks.
A couple of things stand out here -- there's a high correlation between the Leiter ranks and the Sisk ranks (.7) -- but there's a really high correlation (.96) between the Leiter ranks and the US News peer assessment data. The Leiter voters and the US News voters are coming to very similar conclusions....
Related posts on Sisk et al.'s study are here, here, here, and here (a fun post!) More of my thoughts on the relationship between law review citations and law schools are here.
I knew it was science!
Posted by: Brian | October 14, 2010 at 10:24 AM