Hello everyone...have been accepted to both schools and really find it hard to make the decision. on the one hand, i think chicago to be one of the most selective and inspring law faculties in the us. penn, however, has the advantage of offering the summer course as well as the chance to participate in crossdisciplinary studies. how would you choose (particulary with respect to the possibility to find employment in the us after the completion of the ll.m. program). thanks to everyone!!

Hello everyone...have been accepted to both schools and really find it hard to make the decision. on the one hand, i think chicago to be one of the most selective and inspring law faculties in the us. penn, however, has the advantage of offering the summer course as well as the chance to participate in crossdisciplinary studies. how would you choose (particulary with respect to the possibility to find employment in the us after the completion of the ll.m. program). thanks to everyone!!

Penn has to be the choice.

I have asked several people back in the UK about which schools have a more highly regarded reputation, they say that just having an ivy league school seems to fly pretty well. Therefore, Penn would be my choice out of the two if I were planning to go back to my home country.

Penn also has a great location between DC and NY, probably the two best international recruiting areas. That being said, internal flights are getting pretty reasonable now so Chicago is a lot closer to DC and NY than you think. Chicago is also a great school with a really good rep.

You have a very nice decision to make.

I beg to differ. First of all, Ivy League has nothing to do with the law schools, it is a term used for an athletic conference of undergraduate (!) institutions (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth). Princeton is Ivy League, but does not have a law school. And do you seriously want to compare Cornell (Ivy as well) with other law schools from the top tier? Additionally, if you want to work in the US, some comments of English people arent really helpful. In the US, there are the first six from the US News Ranking (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Chicago) and then there are the other law schools. Dont be fooled by the ranking numbers. The gap between the first six and number seven is huge. So, if you are looking for prestige with respect to employment chances in the US, between Penn and Chicago, Chicago it is (I dont speak about special interest, which should be a main factor and might change your personal ranking). For Europe, there are some specifics for each country (Cornell is quite famous in France, in Germany Chicago is significantly more prominent than Penn).
Furthermore, what sources do you have for your knowledge about the preferences of employers in Chicago and Illinois? It is not true that you do not have a chance as LL.M. to work in Chicago. Actually, there are some LL.M.s working in big firms in Chicago. The problems of finding employment are bound to the general difficulties of that endevour in the US for foreign law graduates, but have nothing to do with Chicago in particular.
Flights from Chicago to New York are cheap and take only about two hours. This is nothing for the US. And how many interviews do you think youll have? It is not that you will fly to NY every week. The most important event is the Job Fair (Columbia Job Fair for Chicago, which is, according to what employers told me, far more prestigious than the New York University Job Fair Penn takes part in), this is one weekend. The number of other flights has to do with the number of your callbacks. But you will not be continuously on the road.
In terms of crossdisciplinary studies: If you are interested in the economic side of life it starts right in the Chicago law school with law and economics. Additionally, the Business School is just 5min away and some classes are held in the law school (e.g. Corporate Finance).
From a tourist point of view, my personal opinion (but this is personal taste) is that Chicago is the city with the most interesting architecture in the US. Because of the great fire in the 19th Century, the best architects of the time and the earliest 20th Century had a chance to rebuild the city. It is marvelous. And I like to have the combination of living in a green island (Hyde Park) without the big city noise on the one hand and the possibility to be in downtown within short time on the other.

" In the US, there are the first six from the US News Ranking (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Chicago) and then there are the other law schools. Dont be fooled by the ranking numbers. The gap between the first six and number seven is huge."

... I think it's really time to grow up regarding the importance and relevance of rankings. Same for the Penn-belongs-to-the-Ivy-League business.
Both of these schools are excellent, and it might be more interesting to give accurate details about their respective curricula and areas of excellence.

" In the US, there are the first six from the US News Ranking (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Chicago) and then there are the other law schools. Dont be fooled by the ranking numbers. The gap between the first six and number seven is huge."

... I think it's really time to grow up regarding the importance and relevance of rankings. Same for the Penn-belongs-to-the-Ivy-League business.
Both of these schools are excellent, and it might be more interesting to give accurate details about their respective curricula and areas of excellence.

Just to add something. I believe that Chicago offers you the possibility to take courses in other parts of the university as well, as long as you explain why you want to take that course.

But for the rest, I don't think the difference between Chicago and U.Penn is that big. Just try to figure out what your interests are before you decide, and make your decision based on that.

I agree with you with regard to the quality of teaching, which is overall very good in many law schools, regardless of rankings. But when it comes to finding jobs, rankings DO count, and A LOT. That's the way the system works, period. Actually, for what I've seen there's another line between the top 3 and the rest. Of course, even if you've graduated from a second-tier law school but your grades are good and you have a lot of extracurricular activities and - more importantly you're smart - you'll have your chances. But you have to prove all of that. If you are a Harvard or Stanford grad, you don't have to prove anything, because the employers believe that those top law schools do an excellent job in selecting people. You'll land a job even with bad grades. Welcome to the US.


... I think it's really time to grow up regarding the importance and relevance of rankings. Same for the Penn-belongs-to-the-Ivy-League business.
Both of these schools are excellent, and it might be more interesting to give accurate details about their respective curricula and areas of excellence.

Yps ...you sound pretty aggressive. The choice is nice anyway: Chicago or Penn is not a choice between gold and crap !!!
And for the "there is a huge difference between n°1 and 7, of course there is, but certainly not that much between n°6 and 7 (Chicago /Penn).
I believe this is a really personal choice related to some personal feelings (like the city, excuse me, but Philly is a great place too just like Chic is!!! although differently) and of course the professional future you wana have.
anyway, you got a great decision to make !!! !

My point is by no means to say that Penn is not a very good law school. What I wanted to say is the following: If you take a look at the rankings, don't get fooled by them. Actually, according to most of the US-americans I spoke with, lawyers, professors and students (not only from Chicago), there is a wide gap between the first six and the rest. The basic perception is: first group, in some order: Yale, Harvard, Stanford; second group, in some order: Chicago, Columbia, NYU. Then comes the rest. This is not (!!!) to say that "the rest" is bad. Signs of this difference are e.g. the number of citations, the overall prestige of the faculty, clerkships etc. In these respects, the first six are leading. If you want to have a look at specific rankings, take a look at the Leiter rankings. Perhaps then you realize the difference I am talking about.

And here a little caveat, before the next person thinks I am too agressive or whatever: In my opinion, rankings are worthless as soon as you have a special interest you want to pursue. I did not choose Chicago because of rankings. I am not against Penn (how could I?).

What really annoys me is the way people tried to put their choice in the absolute without considering the circumstances. If you want to work in the US and have no special interest besides that, you should decide for a school of the first six because of their prestige, ideally one of the top three. As soon as you have other interests as well, other factors come into play. Therefore, you might well put Penn ahead of all the others.

I hope this does not sound too agressive or whatever again.

This is a quote:

"The problem with U.S. News is not that it identifies Chicago as a top ten law school (it has been ranked 6th every year since 1999), it is that it has left a whole generation of undergraduates with the misleading impression that Penn (#7 of late in U.S. News) and Michigan (#7 or #8 in U.S. News) are actually competitive with Chicago, and that NYU (usually #5) and Columbia (usually #4) are perhaps better."

Brian Leiter, How to rank law schools, 81 Indiana Law Journal 2006, 47, 49.

Now you might get on me in that this is just a single opinion, that Leiter's rankings are competing with US News and so forth. Partly true.
I just wanted to show that there are actually other people than me arguing in a comparable way. The whole winter issue of the 81 Indiana Law Journal 2006 is about rankings. It provides some interesting insights and adds further points I cannot - for obvious reasons - quote here.

And you mean you are surprised that Brian Leiter says this ???

For your information, Brian Leiter WORKS AT CHICAGO, so it is no wonder that he promotes his own school and looks down on competing schools.

Here is the proof : http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/leiter/

Do you really believe that he will tell you that Penn is the equal to the school he works at ? Come on.

For someone who tells us to take with a pinch of salt what sites such as US News says, you should also take with a pinch of salt what people tell you.

Indiana Law Journal
Winter, 2006


Symposium: The Next Generation of Law School Rankings
Framing the Rankings Debate
Commentary


*47 HOW TO RANK LAW SCHOOLS


Brian Leiter [FNa1]


Copyright © 2006 by the Trustees of Indiana University; Brian Leiter


I have relatively little to add to Russell Korobkin's sensible criticisms [FN1] of the ranking proposals and analyses of Judge Posner [FN2] and Professor Sunstein, [FN3] so I will keep my remarks on that score brief.

Professor Sunstein candidly discusses the primary limitations of "revealed-preference" rankings of schools. [FN4] The two most important of these, in my view, are (1) the enormous role of geographical preferences in where students choose to go to law school, and (2) the more general problem with revealed preferences in all domains namely that they may reveal more about the ignorance of and pernicious influences operating on those with the preferences than about the quality or value of the things preferred.

Factors like (1) give an advantage to schools (like my own) that benefit from regional dominance or regional chauvinism (Texas chauvinism is, in my experience, matched only by that of New Yorkers), and exact a severe penalty on schools tightly clustered with others of comparable quality. (Think of the northeast corridor where, as popular perception has it, Columbia and NYU are full of students who did not get into Harvard and Yale; and Cornell, Georgetown and Penn are full of students who did not get into any of the preceding four.) The undergraduate revealed-preference rankings by Professors Avery et al. suggest as much. That Texas ("UT--Austin") (#38) ranks ahead of Michigan (#42), Vassar (#43), Illinois (#45), Emory (#61), Washington University in St. Louis (#62), and UC San Diego (#85) tells us much more about regional loyalties and regional competition than about the quality or value of undergraduate education at UT--Austin against any of these other schools.

More generally, of course, revealed preferences are always hostage to ignorance and pernicious influence (the main reason why no serious utilitarians, only economists, think revealed preferences are good measures of well-being) and revealed-preference rankings of law schools are no different. Perhaps the primary pernicious influence, and contributor to ignorance, is none other than the U.S. News rankings themselves, which include both the law school rankings and the college rankings. At least some students treat law school rankings as a proxy for professional opportunities and faculty quality, and are, more often than not, misled; while some students treat college rankings as a proxy for university quality and are, almost always, completely misled. [FN5]

*48 Given all this--about which Professor Sunstein is admirably clear--I see no reason to think that a revealed-preference ranking of law schools would provide any worthwhile information.

The utility of Judge Posner's analysis is entirely a function of the underlying ranking data on which he relies. [FN6] A major worry is that the underlying data cover disparate periods, during which a number of things have changed. He looks, for example, at scholarly impact data published in 1998 (but reflecting citations from a decade ago) [FN7] and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) download data from 2005, [FN8] yet by my casual but reasonably informed estimate, faculty quality at some two dozen schools changed during this period in ways that would affect results. [FN9] So, too, with the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) data, which comes from 2000, [FN10] yet which maps rather unevenly on to LSAT data from 2005 [FN11] (no doubt reflecting the influence of changes in U.S. News rankings in the interim). Judge Posner uses the survey I conducted in 2003 asking law professors to evaluate, among other things, the quality of business law faculties, [FN12] but since that time, five "top 20" schools have had notable faculty changes. [FN13]

Apart from the risk of "apples and oranges" comparisons resulting from measuring different time periods, Judge Posner's analysis is also hostage to the soundness of the underlying rankings, even within their time frames. SSRN download data are heavily skewed, for example, to a handful of areas (corporate law, law and economics, intellectual property), and are also affected by which schools have faculty who regularly post on SSRN. [FN14] All citation data are subject to the limitations I have noted *49 elsewhere. [FN15] The national job placement data Judge Posner relies upon are based on aggregating regional placement success in a way that skews the results in favor of schools whose graduates mostly land in high cost-of-living markets. [FN16]

Even if Judge Posner's underlying data are questionable on their own merits, and unreliable for comparative purposes, I do not really disagree with his conclusion that "the U.S. News ranking ... does a pretty good job of grouping law schools by tier." [FN17] I just do not think Judge Posner's mix-and-match approach to the various kinds of ranking data is very good support for the point.

Perhaps more important, though, is the fact that this point is rather trivial, since getting it right by "tier" is on par with being able to hit the side of the proverbial barn. The problem with U.S. News is not that it identifies Chicago as a top ten law school (it has been ranked 6th every year since 1999), it is that it has left a whole generation of undergraduates with the misleading impression that Penn (#7 of late in U.S. News) and Michigan (#7 or #8 in U.S. News) are actually competitive with Chicago, and that NYU (usually #5) and Columbia (usually #4) are perhaps better. The problem with U.S. News is not that it identifies George Mason as a "tier one" school, it is that it does so despite the fact that the criteria the magazine employs to measure academic merit would relegate the school to the second tier. [FN18] The problem with U.S. News is not that it correctly identifies Washington and Lee as a "tier one" school, it is that it often ranks Washington and Lee ahead of schools like Boston University and the University of *50 Illinois that have much more distinguished faculties and equally (if not more) distinguished alumni.

Of course, even in terms of tiers, U.S. News messes things up from an academic point of view, relegating Chicago-Kent College of Law, the University of San Diego, the University of Miami, Florida State University, Rutgers University (both Camden and Newark), Wayne State University, and many others to a lower tier than any informed law professor would assign.

All of these criticisms presuppose, of course, that a ranking of academic institutions ought to reflect certain relevant attributes which serve as a benchmark for critiquing the U.S. News result. Here I part company with Professor Korobkin, who reiterates his well-known Marxist view that rankings essentially serve a coordination function--allowing good students to find good employers and vice versa--such that the criteria by which schools are ranked hardly matters. [FN19] On this view, legal education is really about pedigree and certification, not education and training. As I once heard a prospective law student put it: "I'm going to law school to get my ticket punched. Everyone knows you learn the material on your own anyway."

There is certainly something to this. If, sotto voce, the Fordham faculty were swapped for the Yale faculty next year, Yale would still continue to produce hugely successful graduates for the foreseeable future. But that is surely, in significant part, because the Fordham faculty is rather good. So the real question should be: what if we swapped, say, the Baylor faculty for the Yale faculty tomorrow? While the Yale "name" would continue to carry forward for a short while, surely it would not be long before both students, judges, and employers noticed that something significant had changed--and not only that Yale students were being taught by folks who actually knew how to practice law!

But what is it exactly that they would notice? According to Professor Korobkin, it would be nothing that matters to either the students or the employers. Therefore, the only reason to prefer a ranking that favors the Yale faculty over the Baylor faculty is that we have made a societal value judgment to encourage the kind of scholarly work that Yale faculty do. Perhaps this is right, though I am skeptical.

I am still attracted to the old-fashioned view that those who are smarter and more learned can provide higher-quality instruction. (I am not saying that this is true of the Yale faculty, though it may be in some cases.) This is not to say that the best scholars are the best teachers: that plainly is not true, since there are a variety of pedagogical skills that are unrelated to intellectual acumen. But it is to say that no set of pedagogical skills can compensate for lack of intellectual depth in one's subject-matter, and I am reasonably confident, based on experience on both sides of the podium, that this is true. That difference may be lost on many students, but it will not be lost on the better ones. And whether noticed or not, if the old-fashioned view is correct, then it will affect educational outcomes. With all that in mind, I think an assessment of academic institutions ought to weigh heavily the intellectual and scholarly caliber of the faculty, not to the exclusion of other factors, but as a way of putting education at the center of any evaluation of institutions in the business of educating.

*51 Let me conclude by suggesting four general guidelines for how law schools can be meaningfully and usefully ranked.

First, rankings of academic institutions should emphasize and reward academic values: scholarly excellence, pedagogical skill, and student ability and achievement. It is odd to have to emphasize this, but in an era in which U.S. News ranks schools based on the inefficiency of their spending and their self-reported, and thus largely fictional, job placement statistics, I fear it is necessary to state the obvious.

Second, it is desirable to evaluate law schools along dimensions where there can be measurable change and constructive competition. Not all the elements of academic value are equally susceptible to measurement, but some certainly are. If Professor Stake is correct in his contribution to this symposium [FN20] (and I am persuaded that he is), then one of the many deficiencies of U.S. News is that its reputational surveys of academics are so poorly conducted that they have simply become echo chambers of the prior year's U.S. News ranking. But this does not mean faculty quality cannot be measured more reliably by better-designed surveys or by the use of "objective" measures like citations. So, too, measures of student quality in terms of LSAT scores are hostage both to a similar echo chamber effect, as well as the many other factors identified by Professors Henderson and Morriss in their contribution. [FN21] To the extent more academically sound rankings proliferate, serious students will begin making better-informed choices, and rankings of student quality may tell us more than how U.S. News recently ranked particular schools.

Third, those elements worth measuring should be measured separately rather than aggregated on the basis of unprincipled and unrationializable schema. One can rank schools based on SSRN downloads, student LSAT scores, faculty reputation, scholarly impact as measured by citations, job placement, Supreme Court clerkships, and so on, but there is no way these criteria can be meaningfully amalgamated.

Fourth, we should encourage and welcome many different kinds of academic rankings from many different sources to counteract the excessive influence of the academically unreliable U.S. News rankings. [FN22] If the Association of American Law Schools were not in contention for being recognized as the most useless professional organization in the United States, it would have long ago taken the lead in promoting alternatives, instead of giving students the laughable advice that they should discount prestige and reputation in choosing schools. There is a sizable audience looking for rankings that convey genuine academic information. Contrast my own academically oriented ranking site, [FN23] which garners upwards of 10,000 hits per week during the peak admissions season and has been frequently discussed in this symposium, with the *52 bizarre Thomas M. Cooley law school rankings, [FN24] which contain no useful information and are uniformly ignored by students, faculty, and in most discussions of rankings. If Professor Korobkin were right, though, then the Cooley method of simply aggregating A.B.A. data without regard to its meaning or importance would have worked as well for U.S. News as the methods it actually adopted, which at least attempt to identify some factors of relevance to legal education.

Academic rankings that provide actual information on matters of educational value have a useful role to play for students, quite obviously, but they also have a constructive role to play for faculty. Professor Korobkin suggests that in ranking schools we want to discourage "status competition." [FN25] I guess my own view is more Nietzschean, and so let me close with a quote I have used before. [FN26] This is Nietzsche from his early essay on "Homer's Contest":

[J]ealousy, hatred, and envy, spurs men to activity: not to the activity of fights of annihilation but to the activity of fights which are contests. The Greek is envious, and he does not consider this quality a blemish but the gift of a beneficient godhead .... The greater and more sublime a Greek is, the brighter the flame of ambition that flares out of him, consuming everybody who runs on the same course.

....

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popular pedagogy, whereas modern educators dread nothing more than the unleashing of so-called ambition .... And just as the youths were educated through contests, their educators were also engaged in contests with each other. [FN27]

We should produce more rankings that unleash academic talent and ambition, not rankings that reward decanal connivance at manipulating ranking schemes cooked up by journalists. Although many of the scholarly critiques of U.S. News in this symposium are devastating, only alternative ranking schemes, that embody academic values we share, will counteract the pernicious impact of U.S. News on legal education. In the process, the right kinds of academic rankings may also stimulate and strengthen our scholarly community in law.


[FNa1]. Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program, The University of Texas at Austin.

[FN1]. Russell Korobkin, Keynote Address, Harnessing the Positive Power of Rankings: A Response to Posner and Sunstein, 81 IND. L.J. 35 (2006).

[FN2]. Richard A. Posner, Law School Rankings, 81 IND. L.J. 13 (2006).

[FN3]. Cass R. Sunstein, Ranking Law Schools: A Market Test?, 81 IND. L.J. 25 (2006).

[FN4]. Id. at 7-19.

[FN5]. Law professors may find this hard to believe, but the U.S. News rankings of colleges are even worse than their rankings of law schools. The former are, in many instances, wildly unhinged from academic quality as measured by more reputable sources like the National Research Council. Thus, I have had the odd experience of talking to prospective law and graduate students who thought, because of the U.S. News college rankings, that universities like Georgetown, Virginia, and Vanderbilt were better than, or even competitive, with Texas, when they are not even in the same league. I suspect that faculty at Illinois and Wisconsin confront the same distorted perceptions, and that the University of Chicago confronts the same problem vis-à-vis Washington University in St. Louis, Duke, and Penn.

[FN6]. Posner, supra note 2, at 20 tbl.3.

[FN7]. Id. (citing Theodore Eisenberg and Martin T. Wells, Ranking and Explaining the Scholarly Impact of Law Schools, 27 J. LEGAL STUD. 373, 388 (1998)).

[FN8]. Id. (citing the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Homepage, http://www.ssrn.com (last visited Sept. 4, 2005) (faculty download statistics)).

[FN9]. The 2005 scholarly impact data I recently published makes this especially clear. See Leiter's Law School Rankings, Faculty Quality Based on Scholarly Impact, 2005, leiterrankings.com/faculty/2005faculty_ impact_cites.shtml.

[FN10]. Posner, supra note 2, at 20 tbl.3 (citing Leiter's Law School Rankings, Faculty Quality in the Business Law Areas, 2003-04, leiterrankings.com/faculty/2003faculty_businesslaw.shtml).

[FN11]. See Leiter's Law School Rankings, Rankings of Law Schools by Student Quality, 2005, leiterrankings.com/students/2005student_ quality.shtml.

[FN12]. Posner, supra note 2, at [8 n.6] (citing Leiter's Law School Rankings, Scholarly Reputation in Specialty Areas, 2003-04, leiterrankings.com/faculty/2003faculty_quality.shtml).

[FN13]. For example, Stanford (#3) lost Bernard Black to Texas and John Donohue to Yale, but added Robert Daines from NYU. Yale (#6) added Donohue from Stanford and Jonathan Macey from Cornell (#7). Northwestern (#11) lost Richard Speidel to retirement and Texas (#11) added Black from Stanford (as well as two tenure-track professors in the business law area).

[FN14]. A school's overall rank in SSRN is also highly sensitive to just a handful of faculty members. Texas, for example, would drop from 6th to roughly 15th without Bernard Black, and from 15th to roughly 21st without me. In each instance, I am quite sure this overstates our respective importance to the law school at Texas. A handful of faculty members determine the rank of most of the top 10 schools on SSRN.

[FN15]. See, e.g., Leiter's Law School Rankings, The Top 40 Law Faculties Based on Per Capita Scholarly Impact (Citations), 2003-04, leiterrankings.com/faculty/2003faculty_impact_cites.shtml.

[FN16]. Anthony Ciolli, The Legal Employment Market, 45 JURIMETRICS J. 4 (forthcoming 2005). This is a quite interesting and informative study (though a bit awkwardly written), but the reader must approach with care what its results mean. Its regional placement results (the most interesting part of the study) are affected by the number of graduates of each school seeking to find work in that region. Hence, for example, in the region that includes New York and Philadelphia, it turns out that the University of North Carolina (UNC) ranks ahead of Penn and Cornell! This plainly does not mean a student looking to work in these northeastern legal markets ought to go to North Carolina instead of Cornell or Penn. Rather, the result is an artifact of the very small number of UNC students seeking work in these markets, combined with the fact that they will be a self-selected few with unusually good credentials (the average UNC student presumably does not bother to try to land a job at a firm in New York City). This limitation of the regional results, however, would be apparent to anyone who reads the ranking methodology carefully. More problematic is the way the author aggregates the regional results into a ranking of schools by "national placement," the data on which Judge Posner relies. Mr. Ciolli opts to aggregate regional placement results based on each region's share of the market for elite law firms. But since student geographic preferences play an enormous role in where students choose to work (as Mr. Ciolli elsewhere notes), any school located in a geographic region with fewer "elite" firms will fare less well by this aggregation method. Moreover, since "elite" firms are determined in part by revenues, and since revenues are, in part, a function of cost-of-living in different regions of the country (which affects fees charged), the results will also be skewed in favor of schools located in higher cost-of-living areas.

[FN17]. Posner, supra note 2, at 24.

[FN18]. Only because George Mason has mastered the art of manipulating the other U.S. News criteria does the school rank in the first tier.

[FN19]. Korobkin, supra note 1, at 41-43. On the Marxian nature of Professor Korobkin's analysis, see Brian Leiter, Measuring the Academic Distinction of Law School Faculties, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 451, 454 (2000).

[FN20]. Jeffrey E. Stake, The Interplay Between Law School Rankings, Reputations, and Resource Allocation: Ways Rankings Mislead, 81 IND. L.J. 229, 250-55 (2006).

[FN21]. Willam D. Henderson & Andrew P. Morriss, Student Quality as Measured by LSAT Scores: Migration Pattern in the U.S. News Rankings Era, 81 IND. L.J. 163 (2006).

[FN22]. One must note, however, that even in the world of business schools, where there are five different media outlets ranking schools, faculty still bemoan the effect of rankings. See, e.g., Harry Deangelo, Linda Deangelo & Harold L. Zimmerman, What's Really Wrong with U.S. Business Schools?, (working paper, July 2005) available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=766404.

[FN23]. Leiter's Law School Rankings, leiterrankings.com (last visited Nov. 22, 2005).

[FN24]. Thomas M. Cooley Law School, Judging the Law Schools--7th Edition, http://www.cooley.edu/rankings/ (last visited Nov. 22, 2005).

[FN25]. See Korobkin, supra note 1, at 41-44.

[FN26]. Leiter, supra note 19, at 451.

[FN27]. FRIEDRICH W. NIETZSCHE, HOMER'S CONTEST, reprinted in THE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE 32, 35-37 (Walter Kaufmann trans., Penguin Books 1976) (1954) (emphasis in original).

YPS: Penn and Chicago are very good schools and most distinguished in different areas. Don't you think you took Leiter's sentence out of context?

Since many LLMs are concerned with getting jobs, how about a list of schools where law firms conduct interviews?

For example, below is the 2006-07 Latham & Watkins interview schedule:

American University Sept 6

Bay Area Diversity Career Fair Aug 12

Boalt Hall Sept 11

Boston College Aug 31

Boston University Sept 6

Brooklyn Aug 23

BYU Sept 11

Chicago Aug 30-31

CLEO Career Fair
Jun 9

Columbia Aug 23

Cook County Minority Job Fair Aug 11

Cornell Sept 5-6

Cornell Job Fair Aug 11

Davis Sept 15

Duke Aug 17

Emory Aug 23

Fordham Aug 17

George Washington Sept 7

Georgetown Aug 28

Georgetown LL.M. Tax Interview Program Feb 24

Harvard Oct 3-4

Harvard BLSA (1L)

Harvard BLSA (2L/3L)

Hastings Sept 15

Howard Sept 5

Illinois Aug 18

Indiana
Aug 21

Iowa
Sept 14

Kansas Sept 15

Lavender Law Career Fair Sept 7

Loyola-Los Angeles Sept 8

Michigan Aug 28

Minnesota Sept 13

Missouri-Columbia Sept 8

National BLSA Job Fair Mar 23

New Jersey Law Firm Group Minority Job Fair Aug 8

North Carolina Aug 18

Northwestern Aug 24

Notre Dame Aug 25

NYU Aug 24

Patent Law Interview Program Aug 3

Pennsylvania Aug 29

Pepperdine Sept 7

Rutgers-Camden Aug 30

Rutgers-Newark Sept 6

Santa Clara Sept 15

Seton Hall Aug 28

Southeastern Minority Job Fair Aug 4-5

St. John's Sept 5

Stanford Sept 26-27

Syracuse Sept 20

Texas Sept 25

Texas in Washington, DC Job Fair Aug 18

Toronto Sept 21

UCLA Sept 8

USC Sept 11

University of San Diego Sept 15

Vanderbilt Sept 1

VAULT Legal Diversity Job Fair April 22

Virginia Aug 28-29

Washington University (St. Louis) Aug 16

William and Mary Aug 31

Wisconsin Sept 7

Yale Sept 25

2007 On-Campus Interview Dates:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Columbia 2007 LL.M. Overseas-Trained Interview Program
NYU 2007 LL.M. International Interview Program

"YPS: Penn and Chicago are very good schools and most distinguished in different areas. Don't you think you took Leiter's sentence out of context?"

No, I don't think so. First he speaks about the good job of US News with respect to sorting law schools in tiers. Then he turns on the danger that because of the ranking by numbers, applicants get a wrong impression that the number 7 is actually close to Chicago (or that Chicago is far away from Columbia or NYU).

However, I always wonder why everyone is telling me that Penn is a good law school. I never denied that. My starting point was a different one, as I stated in an earlier post. Enough said.

But, however, I am done with the ranking discussions, they are worthless. There is not "the" best law school (please, don't tell me about Harvard and Yale, I am not interested in this; the mighty two actually are leading in many fields, but not in all; additionally, there are other factors leading away from them (e.g. size of the program in HLS)). Depending on many factors, any law school might be the best for your purposes. These things are appropriate for discussion, not some obscure rankings.

If anyone has questions about Chicago, send me a PM, I am happy to answer and discuss specific issues.

One last thing: Josepidal, I hope the complete copy and paste of the article, although quite useful, does not violate any copyrights ;) But I am not an expert in that.

I think you did take his statement out of context since the author also suggests in the same sentence that the rankings have "left a whole generation of undergraduates with the misleading impression that [...] NYU (usually #5) and Columbia (usually #4) are perhaps better".

Note that he use the term "misleading" and "perhaps" and he suggests that the fact that NYU and Columbia are in the top 5 does not necessarily indicate that they are better.

Anyway like I mentionned above, the author Brian Leiter is a Professor at the University of Chicago and therefore what he says will necessarily be a bit biased.

I am not saying that he is biased, but that unconscously, one would defend the school where he works and it is important to take what he says with a pinch of salt. This should not be too difficult, considering that you yourself are telling us to take other reputable publications with a pinch of salt.

What matters is what employers truly think, and all of them highly value Penn Law : employers such as Skadden Arps, Cleary Gottlieb, Davis Polk, Weil Gotshal, Clifford Chance, White & Case, etc. consistently hire LLM students at Penn (yes, I am talking about LLM here, not JD).

Leiter is not at Chicago. He was just visiting here in autumn. However, his rankings are older. His criteria are clearer than those of US News.

Your remark on NYU and Columbia is an entirely different issue: Not only that US News misleads in the perception that No. 7 is close to No. 6 (Chicago), but additionally (!!!) US News misleads in that you might think that in turn Columbia and NYU are better than Chicago. This last part of the sentence relates to the ranking within the second tier (places 4 to 6). Penn is not within that tier.

However, enough heuristics.

Hi guys! I´m currently doing the LLM in USA and I can tell you that the rankings are almost pure crap, even if you are looking for a job. Please check the web sites of the law firms and you will find lawyers from many law schools, not only from the top 15 or top six schools as one guy suggested here. Moreover, LLMs in general have a difficult time getting jobs in the US, even if you are from Harvard (the job fairs are pure facade by the way, at the end law firms hire guys from foreign law firms to maintain business contacts). On the other hand rankings are related only to the JD programs and are totally misleading if you want to do an LLM. In my opinion for example, the LLM program at NYU is not good because you have classes only with LLM students and almost 400, by the way.

Hi guys! I´m currently doing the LLM in USA and I can tell you that the rankings are almost pure crap, even if you are looking for a job.

What matters is what employers truly think, and all of them highly value Penn Law : employers such as Skadden Arps, Cleary Gottlieb, Davis Polk, Weil Gotshal, Clifford Chance, White & Case, etc. consistently hire LLM students at Penn (yes, I am talking about LLM here, not JD).