My thoughts are that law school rankings matter and they mostly matter because law is not an objective science. Therefore, standards can ebb and flow with the administration.

In my experience, albeit limited, where one does say an electrical engineering degree or computer science degree has less weight than it does in the law.

Tease. You can't dangle gossip that juicy and not at least hint!

Steve,

Ok, I will narrow it down. Not BYU. Not Wisconsin.

If the schools are successful, we should be able to identify them from the movement of bloggers.

Hmmm . . . Brooklyn?

InstaPundit has improved my view of U. Tenn.

Bainbrige has dropped my view of of UCLA.

Illinois has already been hard at work at this (e.g., Larry Solum, Vic Fleischer, Christine Hurt etc). Whether this strategy has made up for other losses (Lee Fennell, Richard McAdams etc), though, is an open question. It might be viewed as replacing people who are high profile among academics with people who are high profile among people who visit blogs (which includes more prospective students and alums than the former category, to be sure). There is no reason a person couldn't be a member of both groups, of course, nor is it entirely fair to characterize the first group as "replacing" the second group.

I blog (I have three, actually) and I am at a lower ranked school, but I make it clear the blog has little to do with the school and there is little evidence - yet - that the school cares! So while the cited paper relies on data for one proposition (that reputation and ranking are linked) it makes pure guesses about the impact of blogging. And then Gordon dangles unsubstantiated rumors to reinforce the claim of the paper! No wonder the rest of social science looks at us cross -eyed! It may be true that some schools have hired scholars with a strong publishing record who also happen to blog - is that what is being suggested here? - if that is the case, so what? All it means is that there is a (weak!) correlation between hiring and blogging. It would be interesting if, for example, Glenn Reynolds got lured to Columbia because of Instapundit, but I don't see it (and I bet Glenn is pretty happy where he is, anyway).

Steve: "And then Gordon dangles unsubstantiated rumors to reinforce the claim of the paper! No wonder the rest of social science looks at us cross -eyed!"

I hope you were kidding.

First, I didn't dangle a rumor, I reported what I know from first-hand experience. Apparently, you don't like the fact that I didn't name the schools, so you can discount my report appropriately. In any event, it is not a widespread practice, at least as far as I know.

Second, my report did not substantiate the claims of the paper. It may substantiate the fact that some others believe, as Jay does, that blogging is connected to law school reputation, but that's all.

Third, if "the rest of social science looks at us cross-eyed" -- a claim that, based on my own experience, has some support but is not unassailable -- it surely has nothing to do with blogging.

Fourth, connected to the last point, you assume that the schools that are recruiting bloggers are doing so without regard to other scholarly activity. That would be a mistaken assumption.

Finally, if you think about it for more than a second, I believe you will conclude that the schools recruiting bloggers are probably not ranked as high as Columbia.

I used to work in the marketing/PR office of a small university. We used blogs to raise the profile and reputation of the school's entrepreneurship program.

Here's a blog post on what we did and how it worked:

http://meshmediastrategies.com/?p=46

I'm about to finish undergrad and begin the application process for law school and blogs have had a great impact on my preferences. Not as much on my view of the individual schools but the legal education system in general. I do look at blogs by professors to try and get a feel for the environment I would be joining if accepted to a particular school.

Gordon,

Sorry, I really did not really mind that you did not name names...that was Bainbridge's point. I just doubt that any law school hired anyone because they blog. And I think we should be very cautious about encouraging blogging as a substitute or even a compliment to scholarship.

Best,

Steve

Law School rankings are a farce perpetrated and perpetuated by the schools who think such things are important. Does a student really get a better education at Columbia than at Wisconsin. The depth and quality of learning is far more dependent on the student's abilities and work ethic than anything else. Learning is not affected by a law school's rank, nor by the number of articles published by professors in "top tier" Law Reviews.

That Illinois was able to add Larry Solum to its faculty (for example) is a great credit to the school. He is one of my academic heroes. Whether the addition was motivated by his blogging, his teaching, or his other academic publications is a question that can only be answered by the people who hired him, rumors or no rumors.

I would also echo the sentiments of BlueOX. They are certainly true, in my opinion.

Thanks, Steve.

LM: "Does a student really get a better education at Columbia than at Wisconsin?"

Certainly not last year. But things have changed at Wisconsin. ;-)

LOL!

Ah, yes. The universe is in constant change.

Except to those who want to fix the rankings. Bless their sweet little hearts.

I dunno about law school rankings, but The Conglomerate ranks among the highest of lawprofblogs.

Again, lawyers care about such things as where their law school ranks because the law is not inherently difficult. Plus, the number of lawyers churned out a year is somewhere at about 143,000 making the market more competitive. In physics and engineering, school matters but hardly as much as it does in the legal field.

Law school rankings may be dumb, but they matter a hell of a lot because the market says they do. Even if you are at the bottom of your class, having a Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc. brand-name on your resume is going to get an employer's attention a lot more efficiently than graduating summa cum laude from a "fourth-tier" school. And that goes for whether the employer in question is hiring a first-year associate to spend countless hours in document review, a law clerk to ghostwrite opinions, a university looking for a new professor to teach "Spider Solitaire Law", or some touchy-feely public interest position.