Law professors, and particularly law school deans, love to complain about the law school rankings done every year by U.S. News & World Report. (Unless their school rises in the rankings, in which case they are an objective measure of merit.) It’s been pretty well demonstrated that, more than a decade into the rankings project, the primary thing the U.S. News rankings measure is how well the school did on previous years’ rankings. In other words, there’s a massive feedback loop going on that is difficult for any one school to break out of. Nevertheless, schools try, because students and even professors, despite their complaints, rely on the rankings to evaluate the worth of various schools.

People have been wondering how to change this dynamic for a long time. Some, like Brian Leiter, have set up their own rankings, although Leiter’s system only measures the top 40 schools or so, where rankings are arguably less important. But what if U.S. News folded? The company seems to be in deep trouble. It’s recently given up on competing with Time and Newsweek in the weekly magazine market, becoming biweekly instead. Today’s New York Times reports that it’s giving up on that plan, too, even before it went into effect: now USN&WR will become a monthly magazine instead. A monthly news magazine? I think the likely next step will be for USN&WR to announce that it’s becoming a magazine with an infinitely long publication cycle, i.e., folding up shop.

If that happens, who will law professors have to kick around anymore?

From Clinicians with Not Enough to Do, this post discusses a new program at Harvard Law School, reported in the Harvard Crimson.  The graduating class of 2011 will be eligible for the program, and over 100 students expressed initial interest.  Students who commit to working for five years in the public interest would be eligible for tuition waivers for the last year of law school.  In addition, forty-eight third-year students signed commitments to five-year public interest careers, and they will receive in exchange $5,000 towards their current tuition.  

The average student graduating from Harvard leaves with $109,000 of educational debt, the Crimson article reports, so the waiver seems like a real help for students who want to take a lower-paying public interest job but otherwise could not afford to do so because of their debt burdens.  

The idea is interesting, reducing the debt load at the outset for those committed to public interest work, rather than providing assistance with loan repayments to those students after graduation.  Loan Repayment Assistance Programs are in place at many law schools; Marquette, for instance, has had one for several years. I have never heard of a program like the Harvard tuition waiver, though, and I would be interested to hear what students think about the idea.

One of the most charged debates within law faculties across the country is the issue of implementing (or not) a ban on laptops in the classroom. Most law schools have wireless Internet access in the building, and some schools even require students to own laptops. More recently, however, individual law school professors (and, in at least one case, the law school itself) have begun banning the use of laptops in the classroom. The impetus for such bans seems to be professors’ concerns with students surfing the Internet during class, checking their email and instant messages, and even instant messaging their classmates “the answers” during class. Some professors feel the laptops create a physical barrier between them and their classes, and they are unable to gauge the students’ understanding of the material.

Professor Jana R. McCreary of Florida Coastal School of Law enters the debate with an article that will be published this spring in the Valparaiso University Law Review. Professor McCreary’s article contributes to the debate some empirical research on students’ laptop use. She surveyed almost 450 second-year law students from three law schools (University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center, and Seattle University School of Law), asking students to respond anonymously to questions about their laptop use in class and their opinions about laptop bans. Her conclusion: many students use laptops as a tool for note-taking, organizing, and, indeed, thinking; thus, an all-out ban would be detrimental to students’ learning. Her solutions: create a laptop-free zone in the front of the class and/or implement a temporary one- or two-week ban on laptops to allow students to experience class without the laptop and to decide on their own whether to continue to use a laptop.