PropertyProf Blog

The Relationship Between Law Review Rankings and US News Law School Rankings

The release of the 2007 US News rankings of law schools has set off another round of speculation on the meanings of the rankings and what, if anything, schools can do to improve the quality of the education they provide, as well as their rankings.  David Hoffman over at Concurring Opinions has been asking about where law schools should direct money.  Bill Henderson over at the Conglomerate has presented some rather sobering data about how static law school peer assessments are.  If you haven’t seen Dan Filler and Dan Solove’s chart over at Concurring Opinions, I think you’ll enjoy it.  And our leader here at the Law Professor Blog Network, Paul Caron, has done his usually excellent job of sorting out all the changes.  Of course, there's a lot of talk about how to improve the rankings.  There's the recent discussion of the Hylton rankings over at elsblog (and here at propertyprof). Andrew Morriss at elsblog has suggested some alternative measures (employment data, ssrn, but not law review citations).

Drawing upon earlier evidence (summarized here) that there is a close connection between the citation rankings of law reviews and the ranking of their parent institutions, I have a new paper that looks to changes in both the US News rankings and law journal rankings over the past few years.

I compare changes from the "2003" to the "2007" US News rankings and changes in citations from 2002 to 2005 in John Doyle's website at the Washington and Lee Law Library.  Because the US News 2003 study was released in April 2002 and the 2007 study was released in April 2006, the periods under study for peer assessment and law journals were essentially the same.  First, there continues to be a high (.87) correlation between a law review's citation rank and its parent institution's US News peer assessment score. 

But what about changes over time?  The paper tests and finds some (well, a small some) support for a hypothesis that as law schools improve (or decline), there is a corresponding change in the quality of their main law journals (as measured by citations in other journals).  There is a connection--albeit weak (r=.21)--between changes in law reviews ranking and changes in US News peer assessment rank over the past four years.  For purposes of my hypothesis, I wish, of course, that the relationship where greater than it is.  The paper explores some reasons why that relationship might appear relatively weak--including that there's more of a lag between improvements in school quality (which might be reflected in places like the quality of articles a law review is publishing) and peer assessments of quality. There's obviously a lot left to explore (like the phenomenon of US News peer assessments converging with citation rankings).

I suggest that if you want to know where a law school is heading, in addition to the glossy material that the school sends out (which announce new hires, student successes, faculty publications, and talks sponsored by the school), one should spend some time studying the scholarship its law review publishes.  The idea here is that what students (and perhaps increasingly faculty) are able to recruit (as well as what they select) for publication tells something about the intellectual orientation and reputation of the school.  I have previously suggested that perhaps US News should begin to take law journal rankings into account in their rankings.  Citation rankings offer, perhaps, a more objective measure of what's happening intellectually at a law school than do peer assessments by people who have relatively little knowledge of an institution.  (On the difficulties of ranking schools, see Joseph Slater's recent post.)

One table ranks the changes in journals' citation ranks over the past four years.  Some have really come on strong.  Here are the dozen schools whose reviews have improved the most in rank:

School	Change in Rank	Current Rank
Michigan State U.	54	109
Lewis and Clark	49	100
William Mitchell (MN)	40.5	65
George Mason U. (VA)	35.5	70
University of Alabama	33.5	54
University of Florida	29	52
University of Akron	28	88
Indiana U.-Indianapolis	27	50.5
U. Arkansas-Little Rock	25	101
U. Louisville	24.5	119
Boston College	24	36
Drake	22.5	95.5

I also detail which reviews are "undervalued"--that is, which reviews are ranked significantly better in citations than their parent institutions--and which reviews are "overvalued"--that is, which reviews are ranked significantly worse in citations than their parent institutions.  Last fall when I compiled a similar table, I observed that DePaul Law Review's excellent ranking (it was ranked in the top 50 main law reviews in terms of citations) suggested that DePaul would likely be in the US News top 100 soon.  I was delighted to see that DePaul is, in fact, ranked 80 this year.

Other schools that you might expect to see rise from the third tier include Albany, whose journal is ranked 49.  Both Catholic’s and Marquette’s peer assessments already place them in the Top 100 and their reviews are ranked 66 and 73.  Other schools already in the Top 100 that are ripe for an improvement in the rankings are DePaul, the University of South Carolina, Chicago-Kent, Cardozo, and Fordham. Michigan State, whose law review is the biggest improver, certainly ought to rise from the fourth tier; its peer assessment rating already places it 112 and its law review is ranked 109.  One might also look for both William Mitchell and South Texas to rise from the fourth tier as well.  William Mitchell’s law review is ranked 65.  South Texas’s law review is ranked 81.

And for those of you who want some more rankings, a final table ranks the main law journals of 178 ABA accredited law schools, according to journal citations.

Let me return, then, to David Hoffman's questions:

what should the smart money be spending cash on?  Employment? Marketing? Facilities? Remember: the goal of this spending is to get as much relative peer-to-peer growth for your buck as possible. So, pretend you are a law school dean. What is in your next budget?

In part I think law schools ought to spend money (and attention) on their law journals.  An increase in law review quality will not necessarily lead to an increase in peer assessment, but I think people are going to increasingly focus on law reviews as an indicator of law school quality.  In part I think they will do that because we're all looking around for indicators of law school quality and we know that there's a high correlation between perceived quality--as measured by US News peer assessment--and law review citations by journals.  (Paul Caron and Bernard Black, whose important paper urges attention to ssrn downloads, are two among many people who are seeking better indicators.)  And when that turn to scrutinizing law journals happens, I think deans will want to be able to point to a high quality law review.  And even if law journals aren't used as measures of quality of their parent institutions, spending time and money improving reviews will help improve legal education--which is one of the points of this whole rankings business anyway, I thought.

Alfred L. Brophy

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The Hylton Rankings II (at properprof)

Tomorrow I’ll be back to posting on property stuff. 

Over at Empirical Legal Studies, the Hylton rankings are continuing to gather press, though Andrew Morriss isn’t nearly as positive on them as either Jason Czarnezki or me.  Morriss raises the important point that Hylton relies on US News’ peer assessment scores, which Morriss finds problematic. I don’t think they’re nearly as bad as Morriss does.  For one, there’s a high correlation (.86) between a school’s US News peer assessment score and citations to the that school’s main law review (for schools in the US News top 50).   And there’s a high correlation (.91) between a school’s US News peer assessment score and the midpoint of the 75th and 25th percentiles on the LSAT of the school’s entering class, as I said in my first post on the Hylton rankings.  So, checking against the (readily available and I think decent) data, they seem to have some validity in terms of measuring school quality.

I, of course, agree with Morriss’ critique that there are some strange things going on with peer assessment scores.  How could anyone say that UT-Austin or Vanderbilt or UCLA is anything other than outstanding-–to say nothing of Columbia or the University of Chicago?  When I filled out the US News evaluation last fall, I ranked about twenty schools as five.  How could I do otherwise?

So should we use SSRN instead?

I agree the US News peer assessment scores could be improved. However, (with respect to Bernard Black and my employer here at the law professor blogs network, Paul Caron,) I can’t yet agree with all of Morriss’ statement that “SSRN stats are far from perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better already than the US News peer ranking.” Caron and Black’s paper in the most recent issue of the Indiana Law Journal is required reading in the rankings genre.  It makes a strong case for using ssrn data to rank faculties.  But “a heck of a lot better already than the US News peer assessment?”  As Caron and Black report, there's a high correlation (.72) between ssrn ranks and US News ranks (81 Indiana LJ. 83, 108).

Anything that’s as manipulable as downloads has problems as a measure of quality, IMHO.  (Before putting too much weight on the ssrn downloads, one might refer to David Bernstein's joking about them over at volokh, as well as Brian Leiter's well-considered thoughts.) My metric of choice is citations to a law school’s main law journal. (It, too, is problematic in many ways and probably ought to be used as one of several factors.)  On that I’ll have some thoughts in the next few days here and in more detailed form on ssrn.

Side notes: some other preliminary thoughts–-including a table that reranks US News’ third and fourth tier based on citations to their journals--are available in a paper I posted last December, which is summarized here.

Paul Caron summarizes which schools benefit the most (and are hurt the most) from the Hylton rankings.

One final note, which I just realized: the Hylton rankings have been picked up by a student discussion board--a sure sign they're important.  One student, "Miketyson," uses the .91 correlation between the US News ranks and the LSAT midpoints to defend the US News peer assessments. And another student, in asking about the University of San Diego, says "Its Hylton is way above its USNWR."  Ah, Gordon, your ranking system has now arrived!

UPDATE:  And now I see that wikipedia is talking about the Hylton rankings.  Further evidence of the importance of the Hylton rankings.

Alfred L. Brophy
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Takings and Patents

Over at Patently-O, Dennis Crouch has an interesting post on a Fed Circuit case holding that a patent is not a property right protected by the Takings Clause.  My own (admittedly somewhat uninformed) comments on the related issue of state takings of IP are here and here.

Ben Barros

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Lingle and Eastern Enterprises

A person who had read my recent essay on Lingle v. Chevron asked me whether I thought Lingle would have an impact on how Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel should be interpreted going forward.  For those unfamiliar with Eastern Enterprises, a four-member plurality of the Court (O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas) held that a retroactive imposition of liability on a coal company for the healthcare costs of former employees amounted to an unconstitutional taking.  Justice Kennedy concurred in the judgment on the ground that the act violated substantive due process, but dissented on the takings issue.

I've never really been sure what to make of the Eastern Enterprises plurality, and unfortunately Lingle may not have clarified things much.  Justice O'Connor's analysis in Eastern Enterprises certainly seems much more related to substantive due process than to other regulatory takings cases, and I think that Justice Kennedy's concurrence/dissent in Eastern Enterprises is convincing on that point.  So on one level, the recognition in Lingle that the Court's regulatory takings cases have improperly incorporated elements of substantive due process analysis could be used to discount the continued significance of the Eastern Enterprises plurality opinion.  On the other hand, the Court's language in Lingle that the takings test is concerned with the burden imposed on the property owner can be seen as consistent with the Eastern Enterprises approach.  My own preference would be to have retroactive and disproportionate impositions of liability reviewed under a substantive due process standard that has a bit more bite than the typical rational basis level of review.  I suspect that Justice Kennedy would agree with this approach.  His brief concurrence in Lingle, which references Eastern Enterprises, continues to use "arbitrary or irrational" language.  But in substance I think his approach, at least in this context, is less deferential than that typically applied in economic substantive due process cases.

I'd certainly welcome the thoughts of other takings geeks on this issue.  (Of course, I'd welcome anyone's thoughts on this, but you have to be a takings geek to care much about Eastern Enterprises).

Ben Barros

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Rails to Trails in NYC

Thanks to Dr. Craig Shelley for sending a link to NPR's lovely story, "Project Gives Forgotten NYC Rail Line New, Lush Life."  It's about an abandoned elevated rail in NYC (about a mile and a half long, built in the 1930s), called the High Line, that's now being converted into a park.

Film at 11--no, actually right now.  Check it out--this is pretty cool.  Great views of the west side and some property talk, too.

Now, where's Danaya Wright to talk about the legal implications of this conversion?

Alfred L. Brophy

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The Hylton Rankings: US News Without the Clutter

I’ve been a huge fan of J. Gordon Hylton ever since, as a youngster, I read his great work on African American lawyers in Reconstruction Virginia.  I highly recommend it to you all.  Gordon and my colleague David Callies and some other folks have an innovative property casebook, which I recommend to you for insights into teaching and property theory, even if you’re teaching out of another book.  And if you are using another book, I recommend it to you for consideration for adoption. 

When I saw, in Jason Czarnezki's post over at Empirical Legal Studies, that Gordon has a new ranking system–-“US News Without the Clutter”–-I was, to say the least, interested.  (Paul Caron's picked up this story.) Gordon makes the point, which I agree with completely–-that law school rankings ought to focus on quality of students and quality of faculty.  The key question for me is what’s the intellectual experience at a law school?  Is it a place on fire with ideas?  If so, that’s a place that deserves a good ranking, IMHO.  I think that’s what ought to matter to prospective students, as well.

Gordon, then, looks at two things: student quality (as measured LSAT midpoint between 25th and 75th percentiles) and faculty quality (as measured by US News’ peer assessment scores).  Good idea–I tend to think that much of the rest of that stuff is (1) manipulable (particularly self-reports on graduates’ employment) and (2) irrelevant to the intellectual experience of students and faculty at the school.

I’m enamored of what should henceforth be known in the trade as the “Hylton Rankings.” 

I thought his method–adding the mid-point LSAT (after subtracting 130 from it) of each school to its peer assessment score (multiplied by 10)--was worth a little more investigation.  The standard deviation, as you will notice below, for the LSAT-midpoint is much larger than that for peer assessment; therefore, the combined score gives more weight to the former more than to the latter.  The means and standard deviations for peer assessment and LSAT midpoint are as follows:

LSAT mid-point                    Peer assessment
maximum 173.0                      maximum 4.9
median 157.50                       median 2.30
minimum 146.5                       minimum 1.3
Mean 158.11                            Mean 2.51
SD 5.24                                   SD 0.85
N=180                                      N=180

So, I tweaked the Hylton rankings slightly.  (I also added in U.Conn, which Gordon had left out.)  I calculated standard scores with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10 for each of the two variables (peer assessment and LSAT midpoint), added the scores for each school, and divided by 2.  Thus, the composite score gave equal weight to the new variables. Here is a list of schools whose “Hylton ranks” and “modified-Hylton ranks” differ by more than |3|. (There are 46 such schools; the new ranks are higher in 25 and lower in 21.)

Schools Whose Hylton Ranks and Modified-Hylton Ranks Differ by More than |3|

Difference	School	New score	New Rank	Hylton Rank
11	Chapman	42.05	140	151
10	Ave Maria	41.09	150	160
9	Campbell	41.57	145	154
9	Toledo	46.78	100	108
8	Akron	45.72	106	114
7	BYU	56.85	37	44
7	Hamline	43.81	122	129
7	Samford	43.81	123	130
7	Southwestern	43.81	124	131
7	Memphis	43.81	125	132
6	Baylor	53.43	57	63
6	Richmond	51.41	72	78
6	McGeorge	47.48	94	100
6	N. Kentucky	41.68	142	148
6	Tx Wesleyan	41.68	143	149
5	Wake Forest	58.50	31	36
5	Cardozo	56.74	40	45
5	Nevada	47.01	98	103
5	Suffolk	44.40	118	123
5	N. Illinois	43.22	131	136
4	Rutgers-Cmdn	52.70	60	64
4	Northeastern	51.52	71	75
4	Michigan State	47.48	93	97
4	Thm. Jefferson	39.07	164	168
4	Whittier	39.07	165	169
-4	Tulane	56.34	43	39
-4	Rutgers Newark	49.95	80	76
-4	UMKC	44.25	119	115
-4	Drake	43.56	128	124
-4	Creighton	42.12	139	135
-4	Nova	38.08	170	166
-5	Syracuse	46.39	103	98
-5	Gonzaga	43.67	126	121
-5	Stetson	43.67	127	122
-5	Cleveland	43.08	133	128
-5	Valparaiso	41.06	151	146
-6	Arizona State	51.71	66	60
-6	Missouri	51.01	75	69
-6	Tennessee	51.01	76	70
-6	SUNY Buffalo	46.50	102	96
-6	Tulsa	41.17	149	143
-6	CUNY	40.47	158	152
-7	Loyola NO	43.19	132	125
-8	Indiana Indnplis	46.97	99	91
-8	Howard	41.28	148	140
-10	West Virginia	40.69	157	147

The tweaked Hylton rankings and the original Hylton rankings are almost identical. The correlation between Hylton’s ranks and the new ranks is .998.  The almost perfect correlation between the two sets of ranks might suggest that there's no need to tweak the scores.

One more thing: the correlation between peer assessment and LSAT midpoint is .91.  All of which suggests that the people asked to compile the US News peer assessment scores are making judgments that are closely related to law student quality (as measured by LSAT midpoint). I will have some more thoughts on this and a related issue of law review citations soon.

UPDATE:  See also the related post, Hylton Rankings II and there's more talk of rankings of law schools based on their journals here  and yet more talk of rankings of law reviews here.

Alfred L. Brophy

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Barros on Home as a Legal Concept

I've posted the final version of my article Home as a Legal Concept on SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

This article, which is the first comprehensive discussion of the American legal concept of home, makes two major contributions. First, the article systematically examines how homes are treated more favorably than other types of property in a wide range of legal contexts, including criminal law and procedure, torts, privacy, landlord-tenant, debtor-creditor, family law, and income taxation. Second, the article considers the normative issue of whether this favorable treatment is justified. The article draws from material on the psychological concept of home and the cultural history of home throughout this analysis, providing insight into the interests at stake in various legal issues involving the home.

The article concludes that homes are different from other types of property and give rise to legal interests deserving of special legal protection, but that these interests can be outweighed by competing interests in particular legal contexts. The result is that in many contexts special legal treatment of homes is justified. In other contexts, for example residential rent control, the strength of competing interests means that the law overprotects the home. In still other contexts, for example eminent domain law as embodied by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Kelo v. New London, the law tends to underprotect the home.

Ben Barros

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