A Letter to Robert Morse at U.S. News

U.S. News Considers Evaluating Law School Scholarly Impact by Robert Morse.

From U.S. News:

"U.S. News & World Report is expanding its Best Law Schools data collection with the goal of creating a new ranking that would evaluate the scholarly impact of law schools across the U.S.

The intent is to analyze each law school’s scholarly impact based on a number of accepted indicators that measure its faculty’s productivity and impact using citations, publications and other bibliometric measures."

"To begin the process, U.S. News is asking each law school to provide U.S. News with the names and other details of its fall 2018 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty. "

 

To Robert Morse.

"Robert Morse. Your proposal to only include tenured and tenure-track professors in your scholarly rankings is an insult to the many full-time, non-tenure track professors who are vital parts of law school faculties. Legal writing professors and clinicians are an essential part of all law faculties. If you bothered to do a little research (ssrn and google), you would discover that these full-time faculty members are also scholars who have made important advancements in legal scholarship. In particular, they publish more articles on legal education than any other group. They also publish articles on constitutional law, rhetoric, procedure, contracts, and all other legal fields.  I hope you will correct this mistake."

(Scott Fruehwald)

P.S.  Mr. Morse: This former legal writing prof's SSRN page lists over 17,000 downloads.   Many others in the clinical and legal writings fields also have thousands of downloads on SSRN.