A New Ranking of Law Schools' Effects on Other Law Schools
A new law school ranking was recently published as part of an article that studied the social structure of the American legal academic community. The article, "Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate," was written by Daniel Martin Katz, Joshua Gubler, Jon Zelnerm, Eric A. Provins, and Eitan Ingall, all of whom work for the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
In order to do their analysis, the authors first created a detailed database of 7,200 legal academics, using the The Association of American Law Schools' annual directory as a starting point. They were looking for those teaching at 184 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association and ranked by U.S. News in 2007.
One of the more interesting results of their work is a new ranking of law schools based solely on the placement, or connections, of each law school's J.D. graduates as legal academics at the 184 selected law schools. The "outdegree" rankings are based on the total number of such connections between law schools, sorted in descending order. Harvard Law School has the greatest number of connections, 993 in all; nine law schools had zero connections.
The authors say that "outdegree provides a blunt measure of the relative influence a given institution might display. The model emphasizes how, for historically elite institutions, 'peer effects' allow such schools to become intellectual superspreaders," with the alumni from one law school playing key roles in shaping the curriculum at another.
It's also noteworthy that there is a very strong relationship between the new "outdegree" law school rankings and the current U.S News law school rankings. The article calculates an 81.8% statistical correlation between the two sets of rankings.
Of course, there are some notable exceptions: Howard University, Syracuse University, and Wayne State University all rank far higher in the "outdegree" rankings than in the U.S. News rankings.
Here are the top 25 law schools ranked by outdegree compared with the 2009 U.S. News law school rankings.
| Law School Name | Outdegree Degree Law School Rank | Number of Outdegrees from each school | 2009 U.S. News Law School Rank |
| Harvard University, MA | 1 | 993 | 2 |
| Yale University, CT | 2 | 712 | 1 |
| University of Michigan-Ann Arbor | 3 | 309 | 9 |
| Columbia University, NY | 4 | 308 | 4 |
| University of Chicago, IL | 5 | 288 | 7 |
| New York University | 6 | 245 | 5 |
| Stanford University, CA | 7 | 217 | 2 |
| University of California-Berkeley | 8 | 201 | 6 |
| University of Virginia | 9 | 154 | 9 |
| Georgetown University, DC | 10 | 154 | 14 |
| University of Pennsylvania | 11 | 152 | 7 |
| Northwestern University, IL | 12 | 111 | 9 |
| University of Texas-Austin | 13 | 111 | 16 |
| Duke University, NC | 14 | 91 | 12 |
| University of California-Los Angeles | 15 | 87 | 16 |
| Cornell University, NY | 16 | 83 | 12 |
| University of Wisconsin | 17 | 82 | 36 |
| Boston University, MA | 18 | 67 | 21 |
| University of Illinois | 19 | 59 | 27 |
| University of Minnesota | 20 | 57 | 22 |
| University of Iowa | 21 | 55 | 27 |
| University of Florida | 22 | 53 | 46 |
| George Washington University, DC | 23 | 50 | 20 |
| Vanderbilt University, TN | 24 | 45 | 15 |
| Tulane University, LA | 25 | 43 | 44 |
Tags: law school | rankings
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the alphabet and Willamette's reputation with other schools
While the exercise of "statistics gathering" provides an interesting look at the nuances of the top schools, the effect of these rankings on Willamette is that they are placed at the absolute bottom of the "ranking" list because the school's name starts with a W and the fourth tier is listed alphabetically. The effect of this "rank" is that Willamette faculty and students have no way to determine where they stand in relation to their tier 4 peers. People remember the last name on a list titled "rankings"; this has to affect the reputation of the school and how other law schools view the school. It is the second time in the last three years in my tenure as a student at Willamette Law I have observed how these rankings crush our moral and make it a little harder to prepare for finals and a lot harder to respect the people at USNW. If Willamette was truly last on the list because of some score or statistic this might be a little easier to swallow.
another point
In addition, this ranking is looking at the overall influence in the legal academia. Only a tiny fraction of law school students become law professors, less than 3% even at top schools. In fact, the vast majority of students who go to law school do not have any intention of entering academia. To accurately measure "success in placement", they should take the number of law school graduates who enter academia and divide by the number of entering law students interested in becoming law professors. That would be pretty hard to do in practice, however. The only thing this ranking might really be useful for is in gauging the overall influence of a particular school in the legal academia.
Yale has a reputation of being theoretical and so attracts a higher than usual percentage of students interested in the legal academia. Harvard students have traditionally preferred to go into big law firms in major cities. But because it's a big school, it has also produced large number of graduates entering other fields, ie. academia, government, politics, etc., which is why many of its graduates are so prominent in many fields.
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