I remember the first U.S. News rankings of law schools in the late 1980s. I was in law school at the time, and Chicago was ranked second behind Yale. The associate dean posted the rankings with this note: "We try harder." It was worth a chuckle, but the rankings did not change my feelings about Chicago one whit. I chose Chicago partly because I had been told it was a great school, partly because it was relatively close to my family in Wisconsin, and partly because it had a longstanding connection to my undergraduate institution, BYU. Indeed, two of BYU's best-known lawyers were Chicago alums: Dallin Oaks (Chicago alum, then Chicago professor, then President of BYU) and Rex Lee (Chicago alum, then Dean of BYU's law school, then Solicitor General under President Reagan, then President of BYU). The bottom line was that Chicago was not #2 on my personal list. It was #1 -- and nothing U.S. News had to say was going to influence that.

If I were going to law school today, U.S. News would play a more important role. It was not available when I chose to attend Chicago, but if it had been I might have been influenced by it. Still, I hope that I would have been bright enough to see past the raw number. In preparing for law school, I visited many of the top schools, including Yale, Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, and Georgetown. I didn't visit Stanford because I didn't want to go to California. In the 1980s, NYU had not yet attained its current prestige, and I didn't even bother to make the trip to Greenwich Village when I visited New York to see Columbia, especially once I saw New York for the first time and decided that I was not interested in attending law school there. (But you were willing to go to Hyde Park?! Yes, but Hyde Park is not Manhattan, and it is closer to Wisconsin.)

My visits created influential, even if flawed, impressions. I did not even apply to Columbia. Or Georgetown. Or Northwestern. For various reasons, I was just not interested in those schools. My visit also negatively influenced my impression of Harvard, though I am not sure that was fair. In the end, I applied to six schools: Yale, Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford (commonly called "The Big Four" in publications of that era), plus Michigan and Cornell. I cannot remember why I applied to the last two schools because I had never visited Ann Arbor (still haven't!) or Ithaca, but I suppose someone with influence over me recommended them.

Shortly after I received my acceptance to Chicago in December, I committed to go there. It just felt right, and I have never regretted that decision. I write all of this to suggest that people choose law schools -- and should choose law schools -- for all sorts of reasons that do not reflect slavish adherence to rankings. For many students, rankings will be part of the decision, and that seems rational, as rankings can matter to future job prospects. But I think all of us in legal education worry when prospective students elevate rankings to a firm decision rule.

Some quick thoughts on how to use the U.S. News rankings:

* Look at the pieces, not the whole. If you are interested in the quality of the student body, look at the LSAT scores. They aren't perfect, but they tell you more than gpa, and a lot more than the general ranking. If you are interested in the intellectual qualities of your future professors, look at the academic scores to see how law professors rate the schools. Indeed, each of the pieces provides some information.

* Recognize that reputations lag. This goes both directions. Recent changes -- whether good or bad -- often do not register at all in the reputational scores. See here for Professor Bainbridge's frustration with this phenomenon.

* Think "clusters," not "numbers." Even at the very top of the rankings, people place much too much emphasis on a single number. "Wisconsin is #32." That is a pretty meaningless number. It probably makes more sense to think of Wisconsin in a cluster of other schools in the same relative area. Of course, many schools feel that they are wildly misplaced in the rankings, though such complaints are hard to evaluate.

* Understand the methodology and its limits. If you are going to rely on U.S. News, you might as well know what they purport to say. Brian Leiter has a great, brief introduction to the issues here.

* Do not rely exclusively on the rankings. As noted in my personal reflections, factors other than rankings are important in choosing a law school. Proximity to home and family. Anticipated debt load. Your future ambitions. School culture. Do not simply choose the highest ranked school to which you are admitted, unless that school also makes sense in other ways.

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