Entries for July 2008

Updated 7/25/08: Paul Caron's Tax Prof Blog has just posted "Deans React to Call for U.S. News Rankings Boycott" which comments on Case Law School's Dean Gary Simson's call to arms against U.S. News.

I was asked yesterday to comment on criticisms of the U.S. News law school rankings raised in an article Dean Calls on Peers to Unite, Kick U.S. News Rankings to the Curb that was published on the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog. Here is the entire response I submitted to them:

Since I wrote the blog post Changing the Law School Ranking Formula in late June, there has been a wide variety of views—pro and con—expressed on the subject. Listed below is a very small sampling of those opinions. It's a debate worth continuing.

The widely read TaxProf blog, edited by Paul Caron, associate dean of faculty at the University of Cincinnati law school, regularly covers the U.S. News law rankings. One of his latest posts is U.S. News Considers Two Changes to Law School Rankings Methodology.

There is one change U.S. News will have to make to our law school ranking methodology because, for the second year in a row, the American Bar Association has changed the way it requires law schools to report their job-placement data. We will accordingly modify the way we compute the percentage of 2007 law school graduates employed at graduation (and nine months after).

All ABA-accredited law schools must fill out the 2008 ABA questionnaire, and—for our rankings—we ask these law schools to report those same data to us. On this year's questionnaire, when asking about the Feb. 15, 2008, job status of a law school's 2007 graduates, the ABA created two separate categories for those law school graduates who are not working: unemployed and seeking work or unemployed and not seeking work.

My last blog post, Changing the Law School Ranking Formula, which sought views on whether U.S. News should change the law school ranking methodology, has drawn a considerable number of comments on this blog itself in addition to E-mails and posts by other bloggers.

First, we're not planning on making a decision on this issue until fall 2008. Our next law school rankings aren't published until late March 2009.