Will Harvard Overtake Yale in the Rankings? Don't Hold Your Breath
Your outgoing editor is a Yale Law School grad, and your incoming editor is a Harvard Law School grad. So the two schools' rivalry in the rankings is a subject of interest -- and good-natured trash-talking -- here in the office.
In a provocative post entitled Is the End Near for Yale's Dominance?, Professor Brian Leiter writes:
[T]he awakening of the sleeping giant Harvard Law School under Dean Kagan's tenure and its entry into the lateral market has meant that Yale now faces real competition at the very top. Add to that Yale's chronic vulnerability--namely, its location--and the eagerness of both Columbia and NYU to hire almost any Yale faculty member at the drop of a hat, and it does mean that Yale Law School will have to work harder than a generation ago to remain on top.Yale will continue to be helped, to be sure, by the small school bias of US News, which has insured (through the per capita expenditures measure) that YLS has remained #1 in US News even in years when HLS has higher reputation scores. And until the changes in faculty quality translate into changes in clerkships and academic placement, one suspects that YLS will continue to have its pick of prospective law students for the foreseeable future.
Professor Bill Henderson agrees -- and has the empirical support to back it up.
Read more, below the fold.
From his post on Empirical Legal Studies:
According to a simulation model of the 2008 U.S. News rankings, which Andy Morriss and I recently constructed, Harvard would not overtake Yale even if:Harvard's median LSAT climbed to 180 and its median UGPA hit 4.0; Harvard's academic and lawyer-judge reputation scores were both a perfect 5.0; Harvard's acceptance rate plunged to less than 5%. In fact, even with these changes, Yale would still have a nice leadership cushion.
You can read more, including an interesting meditation on whether any of this should even matter, over here. (Money quote: "It is so easy to get too caught up on the hamster wheel of envy and prestige without realizing that the energy expended does not necessarily produce anything of lasting social value.")
If Yale is #1 in U.S. News, Is it the Best Law School? [Empirical Legal Studies]
Is the End Near for Yale's Dominance? [Leiter's Law School Reports]
Smith from Yale to Harvard [Leiter's Law School Reports]
(45) Comments
bang
these pretzels are making me SECONDSY!!!
2 = douche
Leiter misspelled "ensured". Epic fail.
Jesus does GULC suck. This article is proof positive.
who cares. unless either hahhhvahhhd dorks or leftist yale loonies have been granted ever-lasting life upon graduation, i couldn't care less who is ranked higher than who.
amen 6
Harvard's LSAT to 180.....who cares? Bachelor's degree (communications) from U. of Idaho gets you to the White House.
I graduated from an internet school and make more money chasing potato skin accidents at Applebees than you Harvard and Yale homos put together.
I'm a firm believer that one's performance in law school is, and should be, more important than the school's rank. Give me a good Chicago Law student over any Yale hack any day of the week. Give me a top GULC student over any Median student at Harvard.
Nobody cares except for HLS & YLS grads obessed with prestige.
Yale or Harvards?
Why not ask T. Michael Rex at Endofesq.com
LeiTTTer says HLS is better---> HLS plummets in the rankings.
Coincidence?
What's endofesq about? It's not another JDUnderground, is it?
Listen, people: it's not exactly a secret that North Alaska State University School of Law won't get you a great job.
Nice East Coast/New England bias ... Aren't you forgetting a certain school in Palo Alto that has the same small school atmosphere as Yale, but with the intellectual rigor of Harvard?
Actually, Penn has been on the rise since it acquired Dickinson College's school of law several years back. Don't count them out.
If Harvard overtook Yale, who would _ever_ sign up to live in New Haven for 3 years?
Kids in my high school used to overtake yale law school all the time. It was no big deal. It was mostly because it is a TTT.
-HLS.
Leiter is smart but his narcissism is out of control. He has moved Chicago up to number three in the country on his various informal law school lists, for example (ahead of Stanford, Columbia, and NYU), now that he has moved there, and routinely invites people to ask for his latest work in postings on his website. The gossipy dissing of Yale in the above post (attributed to an unnamed "Yale faculty member") isn't as bad as outing a gay "friend" (and fellow PhD student) in a blog discussion several years ago, to punish the friend for arguing with Leiter and for criticizing his work, but it is in same tradition. There aren't many issues on which I'm in agreement with the AutoAdmit crowd, but Leiter's douchebaggery is one of them.
endofesq = ATL for retards. Go back to GULC, homos.
And with Yale pulling more SCt-clerks-per-capita (and the corresponding $275+k bonuses) you can imagine that Yale's fundraising will stay way ahead for some time.
Who cares? Your school doesn't say much more about you than your LSAT score. Law is the sole graduate program that decides your fate on the basis of a four hour logic test.
Harvard
Yale
Touro School of Law
Top 3 in any survey
there's the difference between brian leiter and bill henderson. one writes to titillate and the other to elucidate. one focuses on the comings and goings of prestigious names. the other focuses on hard data. one is motivated by envy and ressentiment. the other emphasizes what's good for the students and for the school as a whole.
19 failed to add that UT was ranked ridiculously highly while Leiter taught there. And then it dived in the rankings once he left. He had USNWR's number, sure, but his rankings are mostly a joke.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz................kill kill kill yer'selves.
Wow one mention of Leiter always brings the Autoadmit trolls out of the woodworks here. #19 is amazing. Leiter "has moved Chicago up to number three in the country on his various informal law school lists, for example (ahead of Stanford, Columbia, and NYU), now that he has moved there." Actually, Chicago has been ranked 2nd or 3rd in the Leiter Rankings for many years, even 1st a long time ago. It's ranked a mere 5th in student quality. Most recently, Leiter posted one of his citation rankings, that dropped Chicago to 4th.
The 'outing' story meanwhile sounds like classic Autoadmit urban legend. Can't you trolls go back to Autoadmit?
Did i miss Lat's announcement that he was outgoing? is he entirely quitting involvement with the site?
UC is going to tank in Leiter's rankings (since they overly value citation counts) now that Cass is gone to HLS.
I don't understand why people think they must live in New Haven if they attend Yale. People commute to work, and a law student with all the time in the world on his/her hands can certain drive 15 minutes from one of those prestigious Connecticut suburbs into New Haven when he/she needs to attend class.
30, law students do not have all the time in the world on their hands. I'm up for partner at a top 25 NYC firm, and I worked far harder in law school than I've ever had to do in practice. Of course, I went to Harvard.
#31 - you must be dumb, and the fact that HLS accepted you is testimony to their obvious inferiority to YLS. I worked 3 hours per week in school and is at a V5 firm.
Regarding #29: the ranking of Chicago as 4th was without Sunstein, down from 2nd with Sunstein, but still quite a bit ahead of NYU and Columbia. Leiter posted it on his blog a few weeks ago, I think. Epstein, Posner jr, Baird, Levmore, Nussbaum, Stone still keep the cite count very high for Chicago. It's strange he doesn't count Judge Posner, who does some teaching at the law school, since that would surely push Chicago back to #1.
Regarding #29: the ranking of Chicago as 4th was without Sunstein, down from 2nd with Sunstein, but still quite a bit ahead of NYU and Columbia. Leiter posted it on his blog a few weeks ago, I think. Epstein, Posner jr, Baird, Levmore, Nussbaum, Stone still keep the cite count very high for Chicago. It's strange he doesn't count Judge Posner, who does some teaching at the law school, since that would surely push Chicago back to #1.
Won't the Penn/Penn State merger change all the rankings?
You're a little off, No. 35. "Penn State" is Penn's State College campus. It was Dickinson College's law school that Penn just absorbed, so it now has campuses inPhiladlphia, State College and Harrisburg.
I heard that Penn was going to go down in the rankings because resources were being diverted to support the Penn State football program.
New Haven is not as bad as people think. It's much better than it used to be, and a nice place to go to school.
U of Chicago should be listed as the best law school in the country. East coast bias.
I don't get the derogatory slant on New Haven. It's a great little town: there's the beach; great restaurants; hot coeds from various other colleges on the area; close enough to boston and nyc. Don't sleep on New Haven.
I find it amusing to read about how HLS (usually ranked behind Stanford) is suddenly about to take out Yale. Good luck with that
In that case, Penn must *dominate* hiring into biglaw offices in Harrisburg, not to mention satellite offices like Reading and Mechanicsburg. But how well does Penn compete with CLS and NYU into Scranton biglaw?
42: depends on whether you can effectively network with Michael Scott and Pam Beesly.
"The 'outing' story meanwhile sounds like classic Autoadmit urban legend."
Really? Autoadmit trolls scare people by making up stories about *outing*, of all things? You are an idiot. The tale is well-known. It happened on right reason, a conservative philosophy blog.
Who the f*ck cares?