Bar Exam Scores as a Law School Ranking Metric

Law deans, faculty, and of course students obsess a great deal over the rankings put out annually by the US News and World Report. Some like the rankings, and some hate them. Some find them important, while others dismiss them. Some propose improvements, while others suggest alternatives. Some join anti-US News letter-writing campaigns or even try to organize anti-US News boycotts (nothwithstanding that a concerted boycott of US News would seem to be an antitrust violation, given that horizontal group boycotts are per se violations of section 1 of the Sherman Act under the Supreme Court’s decisions in NYNEX and Klor’s).

But whatever one might think about the US News’s rankings, there can be no doubt that they evoke strong feelings, as attested to most recently by the many reactions in the legal blogosphere to this story on the rankings in last week’s Wall Street Journal. Because of the high level of interest in them, the rankings are a favorite (and possibly the overall most frequently written on) theme of law faculty blogging. Indeed, it almost seems as though a blogger who has yet to opine on the rankings subject cannot be taken seriously. So, lest I be thought an unserious blogger, here is a suggestion for how the US News’s law school rankings might be improved or replaced that has largely, though not entirely, been overlooked. (After drafting this blog entry I did a Google “preemption check” and noticed that a recent comment on the Moneylaw blog makes a suggestion that is similar to mine, and a somewhat more extended treatment is offered by Andrew Morris and Bill Henderson in a recent paper.)

The basic idea is this: why not use bar exam scores as a way to rank law schools?

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Lawyers and the Economic Red Shift

Dalton Conley, a sociologist at NYU, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times arguing that something novel has happened to the life of leisure: it isn’t very leisurely anymore. “[I]t is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do.”

Conley hypothesizes that this intriguing development is the result of greater disparity in incomes at the top end of the scale — what he calls an “economic red shift.” That is, the richer you are, the faster people at the wealth level just above you seem to be pulling away. Combine that with the fact that people usually define their socioeconomic status in relative terms — i.e., how they compare to the Joneses — and you have an explanation for why hours increase with income. Or, as Conley puts it, at higher income levels, “the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater ( … since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).”

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Teaching, Scholarship, Service … and Blogging? Decanal Encouragement of Law Faculty Blogging

Blogging among legal academics was for a long time virtually unheard of, the province of a few (seemingly oddball) hobbyists. Then, with the remarkably successful efforts of Brian Leiter, Stephen Bainbridge, Prawfsblawg, Concurring Opinions, Moneylaw, and many others, legal-academic blogging became more mainstream. While the extent of blogging’s utility is still debated, and while blogging still remains a gratuitous undertaking rather than a formal faculty duty, blogging’s potential as a medium for serious legal discourse can no longer be doubted. Outside of law, blogging’s success has led some organizations to consider recognizing blogging’s value in an official way: by making it mandatory. Will law schools follow suit? Can and if so under what circumstances should law faculty be expected to blog as part of their formally defined duties?

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