Leiter: Don’t Post USNEWS Law School Rankings

Professor Brian Leiter has written an excellent and thought-provoking article entitled An Open Letter to Other Law Bloggers Regarding the US News Rankings in which he exhorts the legal community to refrain from posting the results of the upcoming USNEWS rankings. The controversy surrounding the annual report in which accredited law schools are ranked and broken down into one of four tiers is not new. The legal academic community has long been hostile to the specious rankings and the questionable methodology by which the ranks are determined.

This hostility is not unfounded. Whether we like it or not, there is no denying the influence the rankings have on the perceptions of law schools in the legal community. Perhaps even more unsettling is the power these ranking have over the law schools themselves. There is a race to the bottom and those who game the system to pad their rankings rise at the expense of those that do not.