Over at TaxProf Blog, Bernie Black critiques a recent ranking of law schools by Harvard Law Students. The silly thing about the HLS ranking is that HLS beats Yale. Whatever.
The more interesting thing, which Bernie addresses, is that the HLS students seem to have thoroughly internalized the U.S. News rankings of law schools. Bernie writes:
The usual metaphor for the results of a survey of the non-knowledgeable is GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. A better metaphor for the Harvard students' views is UIUO - US News in their ears, US News out.
Zing!
Of course, the other interesting development is that Texas now has two ratings evangelists, Brian Leiter and Bernie Black, who are using citation analysis and SSRN downloads, both of which show that Texas is a Top Ten law school. Christine's law degree is getting more valuable by the day! [I have edited this paragraph to more accurately reflect my intentions. See the comments for discussion.]
Finally, I just wanted to point out that the folks from Texas are starting to sound like college sports fans, who debate endlessly the East Coast Bias. This is also from Bernie:
Bernie Black (conflict disclosure: I am managing director of SSRN and teach at a school, Texas, that routinely does better on quantitative measures than on US News, which might reflect in no small amount its lack of proximity to an ocean.)
If you didn't know, Bernie taught at Columbia and Stanford before moving to Texas, so he knows about law schools with proximity to the ocean, too.
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1. Posted by BL on November 11, 2005 @ 7:52 | Permalink
Gordon, thanks for insulting the integrity of my ranking efforts with no basis for doing so. It really isn't hard to find on my site that Texas ranks in the top ten by measures related to faculty quality (and that is a recent development--older studies, on the same site, do not have Texas in the top ten there either), and not in the top ten by measures of student credentials and job placement. If you have some concrete reason for thinking either set of results are not credible, please enlighten me.
2. Posted by Gordon Smith on November 11, 2005 @ 9:47 | Permalink
Brian,
When I first read this comment, I was baffled about your claim that I was insulting the integrity of your rankings, because that wasn't my intention. But after re-reading my original post, I see why you understood it that way. I apologize for that.
The point that I wanted to make is pretty neutral: that Texas now has two professors who are promoting rankings on which Texas excels. As for the "integrity" of those rankings, I have no reason to suspect that you or Bernie would manipulate them.
Bottom line: I have changed the original post to more accurately reflect my sentiments by deleting the word "to" and inserting "both of which" in its place.
3. Posted by Scott Moss on November 11, 2005 @ 14:30 | Permalink
Gordon, clearly you haven't heeded the bumper stickers admonishing us all not to mess with Texas.
Come to think of it, we need one of those homey witticisms about Wisconsin. ("Wisconsin: Don't Cheese Us Off"?) I'll get back to y'all on that.
4. Posted by BL on November 12, 2005 @ 11:56 | Permalink
Gordon, you still haven't gotten the point. You write: "Texas now has two professors who are promoting rankings on which Texas excels." Bernie can speak for himself. But my point was precisely that if "excels" is defined relative to US News (as I understood you to be doing), then my rankings include those in which Texas fares better than #15 and those in which it fares worse--exactly what one would expect given that US News measures who-knows-what, whereas I measure discreet parameters of law school quality (scholarly impact, scholarly reputation, student credentials, job placement, etc.). I also do not know what you mean by saying that I "promote" these rankings: I've made them available, for free, for years. Everyone is free to ignore them. I assume they don't because they contain at least some useful information.
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