While I applaud the creation of alternatives to US News rankings (the law school world would be better if it looked more like the business school world on rankings, where competing sources of rankings exist), the Hylton rankings have a serious flaw: their dependence on the US News academic reputation "score".
US News asks a select group of faculty (deans, associate deans, most recently tenured faculty member, etc.) from each school to rank all schools on a 1 to 5 scale. Let's look at the top 6 schools in US News overall and their academic "peer assessment score":
1. Yale 4.9
2. Stanford 4.8
3. Harvard 4.9
4. Columbia 4.7
NYU 4.6
6. Chicago 4.7
Given the way US News gathers its data, the differences can only be attributed to some respondents ranking those schools below 5. Yet on a 5 point scale covering all accredited US law schools, can anyone seriously suggest that all 6 of these schools deserve to be ranked less than 5 for their faculties? I think you could go quite a bit lower in the US News list before finding a school that deserves less than a 5, considering the crudeness of the classification. Relying on the US News academic score values, rather than looking at quintiles or something, seems to me to be a case of "garbage in" producing "garbage out."
The solution is to look for better metrics, which the folks over at SSRN are working hard at. (Bernie Black and Paul Caron had a good paper on this in last year's Indiana symposium.) The SSRN stats are far from perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better already than the US News peer ranking.
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