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LawSchoolReference.com has a unique take on law
school rankings: in their current form they are
fundamentally flawed and should not be relied on.
That's why we are developing a new ranking system that
will replace the outdated US News and World Report,
Princeton Review and the Leiter Rankings. Check back
often for updates on our new Law School Rankings
system.
Here's an article from Law Professor Andrej Starkis that
succinctly summarizes many of the failings of the ranking
system.
Orwellian Law School Rankings
By Andrej Thomas Starkis
Who would have believed it? In the massive game of
deception and delusion that is the law-school-ranking
process, there are fouls being committed: schools
elbowing one another to climb over the competition in
the rankings. We should sweep such abuses back
under the obscurity rug, where they belong. But first, let’
s take a look.
Law schools qualify for the game by getting approval
from the American Bar Association (ABA). Those – like
U.S. News & World Report – who bring you the annual
standings in the race for “best law schools” look only to
ABA-approved schools, presumably because they think
the best schools would be found there.
Here, I’m not sure whether to invoke George Orwell or
Garrison Keillor. The ABA’s accrediting arm evaluates
the school according to a set of “standards” whose
primary effect is to make legal education more
expensive. For example, only under considerable
external pressure, did the ABA jettison some of its more
transparently ridiculous “standards,” like the Lake
Wobegon requirement that all schools pay faculty above-
average salaries. But the ABA still clings to equally silly
“standards”: for example, the ABA standard for
student/faculty ratio, an apparently beneficial policy
aimed at greater interaction between students and
faculty. Harvard Law School, ABA-approved and the
model for law schools everywhere, has a student/faculty
ratio between 10 and 15, but it was recently making a
public promise to get its average class size down to 85
students. How could that be? Well, under ABA
“standards” there’s no requirement that faculty teach in
order to be counted, and there is a policy discouraging
faculty from teaching too much, say ten hours per
week. The ABA doesn’t want to count any law teachers,
like practicing lawyers and judges, who only teach part-
time. Nor does it want to count full-time teachers with a
significant private law practice. Nor does it even want to
count any full-timers who carry significant administrative
responsibilities, regardless of credit hours taught. (At
one time, such teachers were not counted at all, but
again, external pressure forced the ABA to retreat a
bit.) Now the ABA counts those instructors, but only as
a fraction of a faculty member. Thus, the school where I
teach has an unacceptably high ABA ratio despite an
average class size of about 15 students, as opposed to
Harvard’s 85 plus.
Now for the truly Orwellian. The ABA’s accrediting body
has driven the cost of legal education so high that law
school survival now depends on student borrowing
through federal programs. Participating schools are
only those accredited by a U.S. Department of
Education-approved body. Thus, because some law
schools depend on ABA accreditation to be eligible for
federal programs, the ABA needs federal approval to
continue as the accrediting agent – and thereby the
governing body – of most law schools. But federal
regulations prohibit any trade organization (like the
ABA) from being an accrediting agent. No problem.
The ABA has persuaded the Department that it is not
the ABA, that it (the “ABA Council for the Section on
Legal Education and Admissions”) is separate from itself
(the ABA), thereby maintaining its position as the
gatekeeper of legal education.
Once past the game’s entry contest, ABA approval, the
schools, desperate for money to pay the high cost of
ABA compliance, go into the arena to attract students
and put them through the three-year program designed
to meet the “standards” and keep the money flowing. It
is not required that the schools prepare the students to
be lawyers – indeed in many places such an endeavor
will be frowned upon. Nor is it essential even to prepare
students for the bar exam; there are after-law-school
bar-review courses who own that job. The traditional
law school is in effect little more than a mandatory three-
year obstacle course for would-be lawyers, who must
learn elsewhere how to pass the bar exam and how to
be lawyers.
The state supreme courts, persuaded in past decades
by the ABA that only those aspirants who have passed
through such an approved obstacle course should be
allowed even to “sit” for the bar exam, provide the shield
for this massive deception.
Not surprisingly, students want to go to the “best” law
schools they can get into. But which are the best? US
News & World Report asks the other participants in the
system, the ABA-approved faculties in whose interests
the whole system has been maintained in the first
place. It also reviews the “statistics” compiled for ABA
accreditation, including students’ scores on the Law
School Admission Test, the creation of a close ally of
the ABA (which of course has a “standard” requiring use
of the LSAT or similar test, though no similar test
exists). The LSAT, with a mild correlation to first-year
law school grades, becomes a device for comparing law
schools in terms of the “quality” of the students they
reject. A school that can turn away what would
otherwise appear to be very qualified students must be
very, very good. “Exclusive” becomes not a pejorative
but a term of praise.
And so, tweaking statistics hardly seems out of bounds.
Imagine the shock of those caught tinkering with their
numbers that their peers might think them less than
straight and honest?
Andrej Thomas Starkis is an assistant professor of law
at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, and a
practicing attorney. He teaches business associations,
motions and litigation practice, and is director of the
writing for lawyers program. He can be contacted at
astarkis@mslaw.edu
reprinted from opednews.com.
school rankings: in their current form they are
fundamentally flawed and should not be relied on.
That's why we are developing a new ranking system that
will replace the outdated US News and World Report,
Princeton Review and the Leiter Rankings. Check back
often for updates on our new Law School Rankings
system.
Here's an article from Law Professor Andrej Starkis that
succinctly summarizes many of the failings of the ranking
system.
Orwellian Law School Rankings
By Andrej Thomas Starkis
Who would have believed it? In the massive game of
deception and delusion that is the law-school-ranking
process, there are fouls being committed: schools
elbowing one another to climb over the competition in
the rankings. We should sweep such abuses back
under the obscurity rug, where they belong. But first, let’
s take a look.
Law schools qualify for the game by getting approval
from the American Bar Association (ABA). Those – like
U.S. News & World Report – who bring you the annual
standings in the race for “best law schools” look only to
ABA-approved schools, presumably because they think
the best schools would be found there.
Here, I’m not sure whether to invoke George Orwell or
Garrison Keillor. The ABA’s accrediting arm evaluates
the school according to a set of “standards” whose
primary effect is to make legal education more
expensive. For example, only under considerable
external pressure, did the ABA jettison some of its more
transparently ridiculous “standards,” like the Lake
Wobegon requirement that all schools pay faculty above-
average salaries. But the ABA still clings to equally silly
“standards”: for example, the ABA standard for
student/faculty ratio, an apparently beneficial policy
aimed at greater interaction between students and
faculty. Harvard Law School, ABA-approved and the
model for law schools everywhere, has a student/faculty
ratio between 10 and 15, but it was recently making a
public promise to get its average class size down to 85
students. How could that be? Well, under ABA
“standards” there’s no requirement that faculty teach in
order to be counted, and there is a policy discouraging
faculty from teaching too much, say ten hours per
week. The ABA doesn’t want to count any law teachers,
like practicing lawyers and judges, who only teach part-
time. Nor does it want to count full-time teachers with a
significant private law practice. Nor does it even want to
count any full-timers who carry significant administrative
responsibilities, regardless of credit hours taught. (At
one time, such teachers were not counted at all, but
again, external pressure forced the ABA to retreat a
bit.) Now the ABA counts those instructors, but only as
a fraction of a faculty member. Thus, the school where I
teach has an unacceptably high ABA ratio despite an
average class size of about 15 students, as opposed to
Harvard’s 85 plus.
Now for the truly Orwellian. The ABA’s accrediting body
has driven the cost of legal education so high that law
school survival now depends on student borrowing
through federal programs. Participating schools are
only those accredited by a U.S. Department of
Education-approved body. Thus, because some law
schools depend on ABA accreditation to be eligible for
federal programs, the ABA needs federal approval to
continue as the accrediting agent – and thereby the
governing body – of most law schools. But federal
regulations prohibit any trade organization (like the
ABA) from being an accrediting agent. No problem.
The ABA has persuaded the Department that it is not
the ABA, that it (the “ABA Council for the Section on
Legal Education and Admissions”) is separate from itself
(the ABA), thereby maintaining its position as the
gatekeeper of legal education.
Once past the game’s entry contest, ABA approval, the
schools, desperate for money to pay the high cost of
ABA compliance, go into the arena to attract students
and put them through the three-year program designed
to meet the “standards” and keep the money flowing. It
is not required that the schools prepare the students to
be lawyers – indeed in many places such an endeavor
will be frowned upon. Nor is it essential even to prepare
students for the bar exam; there are after-law-school
bar-review courses who own that job. The traditional
law school is in effect little more than a mandatory three-
year obstacle course for would-be lawyers, who must
learn elsewhere how to pass the bar exam and how to
be lawyers.
The state supreme courts, persuaded in past decades
by the ABA that only those aspirants who have passed
through such an approved obstacle course should be
allowed even to “sit” for the bar exam, provide the shield
for this massive deception.
Not surprisingly, students want to go to the “best” law
schools they can get into. But which are the best? US
News & World Report asks the other participants in the
system, the ABA-approved faculties in whose interests
the whole system has been maintained in the first
place. It also reviews the “statistics” compiled for ABA
accreditation, including students’ scores on the Law
School Admission Test, the creation of a close ally of
the ABA (which of course has a “standard” requiring use
of the LSAT or similar test, though no similar test
exists). The LSAT, with a mild correlation to first-year
law school grades, becomes a device for comparing law
schools in terms of the “quality” of the students they
reject. A school that can turn away what would
otherwise appear to be very qualified students must be
very, very good. “Exclusive” becomes not a pejorative
but a term of praise.
And so, tweaking statistics hardly seems out of bounds.
Imagine the shock of those caught tinkering with their
numbers that their peers might think them less than
straight and honest?
Andrej Thomas Starkis is an assistant professor of law
at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, and a
practicing attorney. He teaches business associations,
motions and litigation practice, and is director of the
writing for lawyers program. He can be contacted at
astarkis@mslaw.edu
reprinted from opednews.com.