The Travesty of The US News Rankings: How Legal Education Should Be Measured

Today, law schools and their deans measure success not by the practical accomplishments of their alumni or their faculty; they measure success by numerical rankings accorded by a for-profit publication called U.S. News which – ironically – is no longer in the news business. It is not just the institutions; too many law school faculty measure their value not by the cases they have brought – or the legal theories they have developed to bring cases that perhaps change of the lives of those who need representation – but by the number of law review articles they publish and the number of times those articles have been cited by other academics. There is actually “scholarly work” addressing the citation game and whether article quality is always the basis for citation. If these numerical measurements were only for the purpose of cocktail hour banter, no one would care. Unfortunately, these benchmarks are having a profound – indeed adverse – impact on the training of lawyers and rule of law