A law library director told me once that her dean would not let her discard unnecessary serials. The law school was right on the cusp of moving up a tier in the U.S. News & World Report rankings and the dean did not want to take any action that might jeopardize the accession.
Next week’s National Law Journal has an article “Say ‘enough’ to ‘U.S. News’” by Gary J. Simson. U.S. News has announced “it is seriously considering revising its law school rankings methodology to treat part-time students’ entering credentials (LSAT score and undergraduate grade-point average) no differently than full-time students’.” The author of the National Law Journal piece (he is the dean at Case Western Reserve University School of Law) says the time has come for law schools to stand up and say “no” to U.S. News.
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As professors Brian Leiter, [and our alumna] Joanna Grossman and others have shown, and as almost all, if not all, deans now take for granted, the U.S. News methodology is seriously susceptible to manipulation and remarkably poor as a measure of a school’s quality of education and contribution through scholarship and other activities to the healthy development of the law. See, e.g., www.leiterrankings.com/usnews/guide.shtml and http://writ.news.findlaw.com/grossman/20040406.html. . . .
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. . . I propose that law school faculties and administrations treat the announcement as a wake-up call and recognize how much they have allowed themselves to be at the mercy of editors whose primary interest is selling magazines, rather than providing a means of ranking schools that actually might promote the things that make for genuine greatness in a law school. This announcement, and the wrench that it threatens to throw into structural changes that have been made to avoid being disadvantaged by a deeply flawed methodology, should cause law school faculties and administrations everywhere to finally say “enough” and that they are done participating in a ranking system that has done substantial harm and little, if any, good to legal education in the United States. . . .
