Well, it just makes a lot of sense... the more your faculty publishes, the better your reputation as a law school. I think the same can be applied to other areas as well.

Baylor and BYU came to mind as law schools often ranked as "first tier." Yet you may not find that those two law schools have a "substantial number of faculty members who publish regularly in top law reviews." Perhaps my comment raises a point concerning the meaning of "preeminent" (top 20?).

So, I guess blogging is a waste of time?

I agree, except I would scrap the “top law reviews” language and put in “(a) publications in peer-reviewed journals; (b) invited and competitive conference presentations; (c) competitive grants; and (d) books in top academic publishers.” I can’t think of a reason why the (mostly random) judgment of ignorant (if well-meaning) 2Ls should proxy for the quality of modern scholarship.

You've hit the nail on the head.

I cna't comment for other disciplines, but the "faculty publishing in good traditional journals = higher reputation" also holds for business schools in general (and finance departments in particular).

Gordon,

Re your premise that preeminence can be obtained by hiring and developing faculty who regularly publish in top journals, you noted that your view was "not at all obvious to others." I would be curious about the nature of their objections.

While I don't dispute your observation that preeminent schools, by virtually all extant rankings, have large numbers of well-published scholars, it does not necessarily follow that a non-preeminent school can join their ranks by placing a greater emphasis on more and better-placed scholarship.

The issue you raise is essentially an empirical question. What schools have clearly improved their reputational standing via scholarship during the last decade or so? Two come immediately to mind: George Mason and San Diego. Arguably, these schools prospered by hiring right-leaning scholars who were underplaced or hard to place because of ideology (and both schools may have also benefited from excellent geography, especially for scholars with professional spouses or partners).

Isn't the more common phenomenon that Scholars X and Y at School Z publish well and eventually lateral to school A, where they get more money and prestige? Brian Leiter gives us regular updates of this type of movement.

Scholarship is the most portable of all possible assets. If a law school emphasizes it to the detriment of curriculum and mentoring of students, it will, in the long run, alienate it future alumni--the folks who are needed to raise the funds necessary to pay those high salaries to keep the well-published faculty.

A school that wants to move into the preeminent category (as opposed to a school that is already there) needs a long-term strategy that (a) legitimately helps current students achieve their long-term career goals, so there is a well of gratitude and credibility that can be tapped into in the decades to come, and (b) creates a lively, collegial culture that makes faculty less likely to trade up for prestige and money. In other words, the strategy linkage between publication and preeminence is complicated.

Necessary, probably, but in no way sufficient. High student credentials are at least as important. To a great degree those choices are based on USN&WR rankings, which give great weight to student/faculty ratio, starting salaries (not adjusted for national differences in cost of living, to the great detriment of non-coastal schools), and to LSATs.

I have to disagree that increasing the quality and amount of scholarship is the best means by which to raise a school's reputation. All things equal, I don't disagree that scholarship is a good thing, but I think resources can be used in better ways.

New lawyers, not articles, are the #1 product a school develops. As such, I think those new lawyers are a much better vehicle for increasing a school's reputation.

As a student at UW, I cannot deny that I have made my own mistakes in developing my future career. Nonetheless, I cannot help but think that certain changes at the law school could help both the student body and the school's reputation.

The most important things I've learned in law school relate to breaking down the stereotypes and assumptions that law students as well as general public make about law school and the law. Ask any student, and I think they'll tell you that, paraphrasing an mtv show i may have seen too many times, "you think you know, but you have no idea" is the defining theme of law school and, as far as we can tell, of our future careers. In one sense, it is *exactly* what we signed up for - the thrill of the new attracts many to become lawyers. In another sense, it is exactly what keeps us as students from getting the best jobs, in the most important places.

Contrary to popular belief, there are such things as stupid questions. They exist in interviews. They exist in the law office. When we as students do not need to ask these questions, we look better and more sophisticated. Sure, it's still better to ask than not when you don't know the answer, but knowing in the first place is definitely the best.

So...how do we fix this? I fear I'd type too much in attempting to answer precisely, but I think something more can be said about exactly how a school's reputation rises. First, I'll say that those of us interested in business law and the other related areas that tend to drive BigLaw often have the attitude that those things are the only ones that matter. In some respects, that's not true, but it is here. Like it or not, that's where the money is.

The best way for a school to raise it's reputation is to put more people in the best jobs. As I'll get to, they don't all have to be BigLaw jobs, but that's the starting point. And most importantly, a school can have a huge impact on its students' success in getting and keeping these jobs. As I said before, it's about stupid questions, sophistication, and expectations.

I've been quite abstract, so here's an example of what i'm talking about. Suppose someone gets through the summer camp of a BigLaw 2L summer and head to the M&A department of the firm after graduation only to be rocked by the expectations. Sure, they heard it would be tough, but the young lawyer never really learned what "tough" meant. It took me until a 3rd year course to really get a handle on what "due diligence" means, especially in terms of volume and repetition. While that may be my fault in some ways, I think my experience reflects that of my class mates. Regardless, learning this in 3rd year is too late, at least in terms of pleasing an employer by not hating (and quitting) the job.

If the student knows what they're getting into, she stays at the job longer. That pleases the employer, who likes what the kid learned at law school, and goes there to recruit more. In turn, this benefits everyone at the school. Employers in other fields of law realize the relative ease with which a student from the school could get hired at a BigLaw firm. Those foregone opportunities make a student in that other field all the more attractive: "wow, the student must really want to work in (blank) field - look at how easily they could be interviewing with all the big firms that come to the school." No one at the firm cares what kind of article the student's professor wrote that year, or where it got published.

The hardest part of this model, i think, is breaking down the "top 10%, or don't bother" hiring model that plagues a top-30 school like UW. Additionally, UW faces geographic barriers that other schools do not. There aren't enough law firms in the state to hire "pre-eminent" lawyers. Most need to go to Chicago or Minneapolis. When push comes to shove, the school may not be able to create jobs in the state, but it can position its students as qualified in more than those midwest markets.

Once these things happen, the floodgates open. Alumni like their experience, they give more money to the school, and it pays the best profs to come over.

I suppose creating this type of atmosphere doesn't have to be mutually exclusive with increasing scholarship - but if so, I don't think support for scholarship maximizes resources.

Re Michael's comments:

USN&WR used to relied upon starting salaries of graduates, but they dropped that a few years ago. Now, employment statistics at graduation (which are heavily gamed) are used in their place. The new US News methodology is online here: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/about/06law_meth_brief.php

Re an anti-coast bias, Andy Morriss and I recently completed an empirical study of the market for high LSAT students (available on SSRN). Our regression models showed that over the last 12 years, non-elite schools in major corporate law markets (which include coastal cities such as NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, and DC) were generally able to attract higher LSAT students than their non-elite, non-big-market counterparts.

Andy and I think this relationship is attributable to the concentration of high-end corporate law jobs (e.g., Am Law 200 firms) in these cities. We documented that OCI activity among these firms is a function of US News rankings, large school size (e.g., Georgetown versus Yale), and geographic proximity.

Employment prospects for spouses/partners probably also makes it easier to recruit faculty to large coastal cities. So, in terms of rankings, the winds are generally at the backs of law schools in large coastal markets.

i agree with your thesis entirely. the fact that other faculty members disagree suggests to me one thing: they don't publish in the top journals; and nobody reads what they do publish except other irrelevant professors of critical legal studies.

and when a school's ranking -- based on faculty scholarship goes up -- the median lsats of the students will quickly follow.

but please answer the following question:

what peer-reviewed legal journals are there?
i don't even know of any.