The newest crop of law school rankings have been out for a while and I’m quite surprised that I haven’t put my two cents in about the whole mess. Former UH Law Center Dean Nancy R. chimed in with a string of posts about the whole ranking madness and even put a spreadsheet together. Now when I pitched an awkward social analogy about rankings to Gilman he didn’t take to it but I offer it up here for you to decide.
I reckon law school rankings are like the Miss USA/Universe pageant. When your daughter/ sister/ girlfriend/ cousin/ neighbour/ local girl/ city girl/ state girl/ national girl wins everyone oohs and aahs about how great the Miss USA/World is, about how important it is to showcase local cultures so on and so forth ad nauseam. But when aforementioned young lady doesn’t win ( or some other lady wins who you don’t care about) you’ll say, ‘Oh what do those things mean anyway…their just an excuse for women to be degraded etc etc’.
I think rankings for schools are somewhat the same. I think it’s wonderful that U.S. News took the effort and initiative to quantify somethings about law school that are important such as Student/faculty ratios which I think are a wonderful metric to measure. But when you try and quantify the unquantifiable such as ‘reputation’ and put a disproportionate amount of weight to such criteria you will get a very skewed perception of what is reality.
So while I think that it is important for law schools and all schools for that matter to be concerned with metrics such as minority enrollment, tenured faculty, scholarships etc. there are some things that remain to be seen, felt and heard that no ranking will ever give you.
This was very much the topic of conversation in today’s Contracts Class with the ever-voluble Tony Chase. How do you deal with expressly subjective terms in contract you’re supposed to evaluate objectively?
Here you see the need for the world to come to objective, quantifiable & determinate states on things that don’t necessarily lend themselves to such segregation. Now there’s something to think about.
