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?
As a frequent critic of the federal sentencing guidelines (see, e.g., my post from Monday), my readers–yeah, both of them–often assume that I dislike sentencing guidelines in general. To the contrary, I think that sentencing guidelines remain a good idea and have worked quite well in many states (not in Wisconsin, unfortunately, but I will leave that post for another day). The problem with the federal sentencing system is not that it has guidelines, but that it has bad guidelines.
