Two law professors have released detailed data on law schools on their Web site. They say their goal is "to facilitate rigorous, comprehensive, and transparent empirical analysis of law schools and legal education." The data, from the Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools, includes information on law school faculties, curriculum, enrollment, the ethnicity of students, tuition, living expenses, GPA and LSAT scores, attrition, grants, scholarships and student employment after law school. The data has been available on the American Bar Association's Web site, but the professors, Bill Henderson of Indiana University and Andrew Morriss of the University of Illinois, massaged it to make it easier to analyze. The professors recently wrote a column for The American Lawyer defending U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings.The rankings, which attempt to name the nation's best law schools, are despised by many law school faculty and administrators. So much so that one professor created his own rankings, which purport to be better because they place more emphasis on academics, while another developed The Law School Ranking Game, an attempt to prove the rankings are so arbitrary as to be meaningless. The rankings have spawned critical academic papers, including one that discusses the lengths to which some schools may go to boost their rank. Henderson and Morriss, however, argue that law schools have only themselves to blame:
U.S. News is influential among prospective students at least in part because the magazine does what the law schools don't: give law students easy-to-compare information that sheds light on their long-term employment prospects. Law schools could easily supply that information themselves, but they choose not to. In fact, as the collective head shaking about the rankings has increased, the growth of the large law firm sector—which pay salaries that justify the rapidly escalating cost of legal education—has made the rankings more important.
Our research suggests that prospective students care a great deal about their post–law school employment and bar passage prospects—information that law schools could readily compile and supply. We found that rather than work to provide applicants with the kind of information they say they want and need, law schools tend to report information in a manner that undermines the applicants' ability to engage in meaningful comparative assessments on measures that matter. These practices, which range from puffery to borderline deceit, are all aimed at improving their U.S. News rankings. As a result, even as the rankings have become more important, they have become less reliable.
