What should we make of the “beauty pageant” of the traditional law-school rankings? They all teach pretty much the same material in the same way, with faculty who have been through the same education. But some are regarded as “elite,” such as Yale, which has been No. 1 for a long time. A friend once told me that when it came to interviewing students for his law firm, he cringed at Yalies because their heads had been filled with lots of useless theory and they knew little of the nuts and bolts of the law.
And now Yale and a number of other supposedly top law schools say they are no longer going to participate in the rankings game. So what?
In today’s Martin Center article, Matthew Andersson ponders the old rankings game and suggests a new way of ranking law schools. He writes,
At present, law-school rankings function mostly as sales and branding mechanisms rather than providing an actual managerial report that reflects institutional performance. They speak very little, if at all, to the way a school is run operationally and its specific strategic plans.
Andersson regards the law schools at these universities as the best: Texas A&M, Drexel, University of South Dakota, St. Mary’s University, and Samford. And the worst: Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, New York University, and Stanford.
A big element in Andersson’s ranking is corruption. How badly has the school been corrupted by leftist ideology? At some, such as Yale, it’s everywhere; at others, it hasn’t penetrated too far.
Andersson concludes,
Traditional rankings present a fundamental philosophical problem, in that they support the pretenses that law is something separate from you and your life (it isn’t); that law professors know more about natural law than you do (they don’t); and that the practice of law is a hierarchical intellectual and reasoning act (only partly). Breaking down the traditional rankings myth is among the steps necessary to breaking down the legal barriers that protect pricing distortions, limit technical advancement, and reinforce intellectual corruption and economic waste. It can’t happen soon enough.