Alternatives to the U.S. News Law School Rankings
Every student who has just one time looked through the rankings knows that the most popular is U.S. News and World Report magazine’s rankings. It is paid too much attention for its rankings with the help of what the magazine have to defend itself from numerous critics.
There are a many alternative law school rankings which have been prepared, often as a response to those by US News. The Internet Legal Research Group has published links and background on plenty of these rankings at their website.
Judging the Law School Rankings
This publishing is also called the Brennan rankings, in reference to the President of Cooley Law School. He is involved in their making. Thomas M. Cooley Law School - a school consistently devided in the fourth tier by US News, - struck back by making its own set of ratings. The first edition of this ranking, with the name “Judging the Law Schools” was published in 1996 by Thomas E. Brennan, Sr. who founded and headed the Cooley Law School. This online periodical evaluates things such as square footage of library, library open hours and number of minority students, among plenty of other values. Now it has seven editions and is available on Cooleys website. Brian Leiter, whose opinions on the Judging the Law School Rankings are supported by many, calls their system “Mysterious”. It happens because the system places Cooley Law School higher than Stanford and Berkeleys Boalt Hall and others.
Gourman Report
Dr. Jack Gourman is the first ranker of law schools. He is a professor at California State University-Northridge. His investigations collected in a print book published by Princeton Review, evaluates graduate and undergraduates schools. The last edition to include law school ratings was published in 1997. Among the criticisms to the Gourman Report rankings is that it favors large, public universities and the use of a methodology that prevents the user from careful analysis.
Hylton Rankings
Another set of rankings, which has recently received popularity, is the Hylton Rankings, created by Dr. J. Gordon Hylton of Marquette Universitys Law School. Hylton billed his ratings as US News information “without the clutter”. The rankings consider only LSAT (converted median) and peer assessment (as measured by US News survey of law professors). The much-discussed "top fourteen schools," though ordered differently, remain the same.
Leiter rankings
A law professor at University of Texas School of Law, has made a set of various rankings that he dubs Leiters Law School Rankings. The rankings named after Brian Leiter judge schools on criteria similar to those used by US News, such as incoming student LSAT/GPA profiles, and also on faculty reputation and scholarly research. This puts the point “exclusively on the 3 factors central to a good legal education: the quality of the faculty, the quality of the student body, and the quality of teaching”. Among the criticisms of the Leiter Rankings is that they include various lists of schools ranked by innodividual factors, but no attempt is made to create a combined or overall ranking.
