A Blueprint to Reclaim Legal Education from External Rankers

A Blueprint to Reclaim Legal Education from External Rankers Scott Rempell* ABSTRACT The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) law school rankings have impacted the perceptions and behaviors of everyone in the rankings ecosystem for decades. Commentators have almost universally condemned these ordinal rankings, yet they continue to influence the legal education market, often in highly detrimental ways. The influence of these rankings stems from legitimate market demands, for reasons that the psychology of choice literature makes clear. People want (or need) to efficiently acquire and digest information that could help them make consequential decisions. At a time when consumers of law school information did not have such choice-making assistance, U.S. News filled the void. Whether purportedly relevant information comes from U.S. News, different rankers of law schools, or other sources of information, the fundamental problem is that these sources are filling a void that exists because of law schools’ inaction. The law school community is the only cohort of entities that can create data about certain relevant considerations that are currently missing, and they are best positioned to both refine the data categories that currently exist and communicate the potential significance of the generated data. Without a more comprehensive product, law school data consumers will continue to rely on incomplete and potentially misleading information, arbitrarily reduced to a single composite score and ordinal rank by commercial enterprises like U.S. News. * Professor of Law, South Texas College of Law Houston. For valuable feedback and observations, my thanks to Amanda Harmon Cooley, Brian Gallini, and Colleen Manning. This article also benefited from feedback I received at South Texas’s faculty scholarship workshop in the fall of 2023, and insights about the U.S. News rankings that I gathered during a discussion group at the 2023 Southeastern Association of Law Schools Annual Conference, entitled “U.S. News Rankings: Participation, Reformation, or Abstention?” 57 58 Seattle University Law Review [Vol. 48:57 This Article provides a blueprint for how the law school community can create an alternative product and reclaim legal education. Such a product would add considerable value to all law school data consumers, including prospective students, law professors, law school administrators, and legal employers. This is laudable in its own right, but such a product would also diminish the influence of rankers like U.S. News because its value would make the deficiencies of the current rankings too obvious for the market to ignore. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................59 I. CHOICE PSYCHOLOGY AND DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES ...............66 A. The Psychology of Choice ..............................................................67 B. Law School Selection and Choice ..................................................71 II. THE EFFECTS OF ORDINAL RANKINGS ...............................................72 A. Positive Effects ...............................................................................73 B. Negative Effects ..............................................................................75 III. THE BLUEPRINT .................................................................................81 A. Ownership and Data Acquisition ...................................................81 B. Attributes to Assess ........................................................................82 1. Attributes Currently Considered ................................................83 a. Selectivity (LSAT, GPA, Acceptance Rates) .........................83 b. Faculty and Library Resources (Ratios)...............................88 c. Job Placement and Bar Passage ...........................................91 d. Quality Assessment (Scholarly Impact) ................................95 2. Curricular and Programmatic Opportunities ...........................104 3. Instructional Quality ................................................................105 4. Diversity (in All Its Forms) .....................................................110 5. The Cumulative Criteria and a Note on Specialty Rankings ......................................................................111 C. Presentation and Interface Characteristics .................................114 CONCLUSION..........................................................................................117 A. Ground Level ................................................................................117 B. 10,000 Feet ...................................................................................118 C. 30,000 Feet ..................................................................................120 2024] Reclaiming Legal Education 59 INTRODUCTION The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) law school rankings dominate the legal education market.1 U.S. News determines the variables it thinks should be relevant to assessing law schools, dictates the significance of each variable, and mandates that an ordinal ranking should frame how consumers evaluate law schools.2 In turn, these actions influence not only the behavior of law school administrators but also the perceptions and behaviors of all constituencies in the rankings ecosystem, from law professors and prospective students to legal employers.3 Despite its dominant role, the U.S. News rankings are not methodologically sound and do not account for many attributes that consumers of rankings would or might consider relevant.4 Moreover, even though an ordinal ranking of law schools aligns with U.S. News’s commercial interests, this presentation format disregards the divergent consumer objectives that are not well-served by a one-size-fits-all approach.5 Given these shortcomings, it is not surprising that the rankings have garnered so much criticism.6 More surprising, perhaps, is that despite commentators almost universally condemning the rankings for decades, the U.S. News rankings still 1. MARTHA DAUGHTREY, TRACY GILES, PHOEBE HADDON, PAULINE A. SCHNEIDER & KENT SYVERUD, ABA SEC. ON LEGAL EDUC. & ADMISSIONS TO THE BAR, REPORT OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON THE U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT RANKINGS 1, 4 (2010) [https://perma.cc/3CJGKBMG] (reviewing U.S. News’s dominant role and how difficult it is to displace a dominant rankings system); see also Rachel F. Moran, Of Rankings and Regulation: Are the U.S. News & World Report Rankings Really a Subversive Force in Legal Education?, 81 IND. L.J. 383, 396 (2006) (describing the rankings as “the monkey on legal education’s back”). 2. To refer to the broad cohort of individuals that internalize rankings information to develop impressions or make decisions, this Article will variously refer to this group as consumers, data consumers, information consumers, or rankings consumers. 3. See infra Part (...truncated)