Annual law-school rankings unrealistic

In April 2006, the law school deans of America raised a hue and cry against U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of their institutions. In an open letter, they cautioned against relying upon numerical rankings and implored applicants to evaluate law schools holistically.

It was an appealing message: Deans don't agonize over law school rank, so neither should you. But today, the group most in need of that pep talk seems to be the law school administrators.

At law schools across the country, rank fluctuation is serious business. The annual U.S. News graduate school rankings hit newsstands Friday. Before the day was out, several law school deans had issued schoolwide e-mails apologizing for slips and pledging to regain lost ground.

Interim dean Makau Mutua of the University at Buffalo Law School — which dropped from 77 to 100 in the rankings this year — pledged to do everything in his power "to rectify this situation as quickly as possible. My goal is to get this law school into the top 50," he said in an e-mail to students Friday, which was leaked to the popular legal tabloid Web site Above The Law.

Even deans safely in the top 50 seemed equally anxious about decidedly smaller dips in rank. Law students at the University of Minnesota (which slipped from 20 to 22) and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (down two places to 38) received damage-control e-mails.

Dean Carolyn Jones of the University of Iowa College of Law responded to that school's slight slide (from 24 to 27) by admitting that "hundreds of hours of sophisticated thought by alumni, faculty and staff" have gone into "studying the U.S. News rankings" — an initiative "informally dubbed the Apollo Project."

As a law student, I find it worrisome that a respected dean can issue a letter whose sole purpose is to minimize the importance of the U.S. News rankings, then turn around and obsess over those very rankings.

To understand why law school rankings are so maddening to administrators, it helps to know why they are so unrealistic. Because each state administers its own bar exam, most law schools are regionally biased to some degree. A handful of top schools are considered national — meaning their graduates can and do find work in legal markets across the country — but at most schools, graduates often end up working in-state.

Ignoring this, U.S. News piles all schools into a single national ranking. This is misleading and unhelpful, since it encourages prospective students to weigh law schools as interchangeable commodities as opposed to entities with strong local ties.