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I think instead of overall rankings, it would be more informative for law schools to have rankings for the specific things people actually care about. So things
by eachro 4y ago
I think instead of overall rankings, it would be more informative for law schools to have rankings for the specific things people actually care about. So things like: prospects for getting a Big Law job, getting a federal law clerkship, doing public interest work, etc.
Sure, people will always care about overall ranking for the prestige (though I expect overall rankings to correlate highly with big law job odds/overall compensation) but at least if it's split up into these very specific sub-criteria, then people can't quite game the rankings in a dishonest way.
- ralph84 4y agoThe problem with that is the rankings are used as an input for hiring decisions, so then it's just a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
- eachro 4y agoThat's a fair point but from the top 10 law schools POV, they have no incentive to care about this. On the flip side, this is the sort of self-reinforcing feedback loop that allows top ranked schools to collect the best talent (or at least the kind of specific students that have the capacity to grind in the way that is necessary to succeed at Big Law firms). If the new hires arent up to par, then this is something the the law firms should be incentivized to address. Since hiring practices generally haven't changed over the last 20 years, I'd guess that hiring from top law schools is perfectly fine (and maybe that is an indictment on the nature of work that happens at law firms).