Bloomberg's 'The 10 Most Underrated Law Schools' Is A Terribly Stupid List

Perhaps the most irresponsible advice for undergraduates ever.

There are a lot of factors that can make for an underrated movie. Perhaps the acting transcends a woefully subpar script. Or maybe the dialogue hangs in your memory long after the plot itself falls forgotten. Or maybe you’ve found a symbolic meaning to Deuce Bigalow that no one considered before. But there’s one feature that all underrated movies share:

They’re actually bad.

There may be a redeeming quality or two, but fundamentally, the film never caught fire for a reason and your effort to resuscitate some personal favorite to respectability to save your own reputation with your friends is just pathetic. Stop trying to make Gigli happen. It’s not going to happen.

This goes double for Bloomberg Business’s sad “The 10 Most Underrated Law Schools” post. Just try to get through this paragraph with a straight face:

There is a strong chance you have never heard of the Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law at Campbell University. The Raleigh, N.C., school is not prestigious enough to be ranked among U.S. News and World Report’s best law schools, and it enrolls only about 400 students at a time. Yet a new law school ranking suggests that most of us are probably underestimating Campbell.

Nope. We’re not. According to Law School Transparency, Campbell earned an employment score of 57.8 percent and an underemployment score of 20.8 percent. This makes it superior to, say, Florida Coastal, but that’s not exactly high praise.

Alfred Brophy, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, published a paper online on Sunday that grades law schools on just three measures of success. Brophy’s simple accounting looks at students’ employment outcomes, their median scores on the Law School Admission Test, and the number of citations that a school’s law review receives. By distilling the rankings down to these metrics, Brophy says he can get at the essence of a law school’s worth: how well it prepares its students for the profession they have chosen.

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It’s unclear why “citations to a school’s law review” would have diddly to do with the quality of the school. Professor Brophy says this in his paper:

While many anonymous commentators criticized the inclusion of the scholarly output of a law school as a significant factor in ranking in the previous paper, citations offer one gauge that reflects the scholarly output and aspirations of a school.

Ahem. Bulls**t. Like most law reviews, a quick look at the latest edition of the Campbell Law Review reveals pieces written by law professors from pretty much everywhere except Campbell Law. Now if Brophy measured citations to works written by faculty from each law school, that might say something about the scholarship of the school. But he doesn’t. He uses “citations to a law school’s main law review over the period 2007-2014.”

Citations, moreover, are one popular tool for ranking – often, as in the work of Brian Leiter and Gregory Sisk, the citations are to the work of law faculty members.

Jesus, I can’t believe I’m about to write this: Brian Leiter is 100 percent right here.

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In defense of Professor Brophy, this paper is actually pretty good, and — to the extent it focuses on employment outcomes — it mirrors a lot of the work we at Above the Law value in our own Top 50 Law School Rankings. Unfortunately, his paper has gotten a little hijacked by Bloomberg Business here. Professor Brophy endeavors to rank all law schools with an eye toward helping students understand the more important output factors that U.S. News largely overlooks. But Bloomberg Business focuses only on his list of the schools that outperformed their U.S. News ranking and treats this as an endorsement. I doubt that was the intention.

Let’s just look at the list (and Brophy drops the citation factor for this ranking):

1. Campbell University
Brophy Rank: 112
U.S. News rank: unranked

2. Drexel University
Brophy Rank: 87
U.S. News rank: 127

3. University of Montana
Brophy Rank: 73
U.S. News rank: 113

4. Mercer University
Brophy Rank: 81
U.S. News rank: 118

5. University of South Dakota
Brophy Rank: 111
U.S. News rank: 145

6. Albany Law School
Brophy Rank: 108
U.S. News rank: 138

7. University of Idaho
Brophy Rank: 98
U.S. News rank: 127

8. Louisiana State University
Brophy Rank: 65
U.S. News rank: 94

9. Northern Illinois University
Brophy Rank: 125
U.S. News rank: unranked

10. Villanova University
Brophy Rank: 61
U.S. News rank: 87

Unsurprisingly, LSU and Villanova are both members of the ATL Top 50 (#41 and #38 respectively), which one might expect from a ranking that heavily favors employment outcomes.

“The difference between a Toyota Corolla and a Nissan Sentra isn’t that great. That’s the analogy I would make,” says Brophy.

True. But there’s a world of difference between a Sentra and Fiat with only two tires. That’s why there’s not much difference between Emory (ranked 45th by ATL) and Villanova (ranked 38th), but this list, on its face, peddles to 0Ls (or Ks) the message that a school ranked 112th in the country based on employment outcomes and LSAT scores is some kind of hidden gem worth considering. That’s simply irresponsible of Bloomberg Business. Prospective law students don’t necessarily understand the career-long repercussions of dropping nearly $250,000 to get a degree from Campbell Law and its 57 percent chance of getting a job.

Is Bloomberg Business on the ABA payroll? Seriously, this post (from the same author) comes a couple months after this travesty of statistical manipulation encouraging students to enroll in law school. And yet, she used to understand the glut of unnecessary law schools. What happened since December, eh?

All right, one more from Bloomberg:

The 112th-ranked Campbell put 60 percent of its graduates in full-time law jobs. Compare that to Emory, ranked 28 by Brophy, where 63 percent of grads landed those types of jobs. Even at Yale law, ranked 12th here, just 70 percent of graduates got permanent legal jobs.

Just 70 percent of Yale Law grads got permanent legal jobs. As lawyers, we all understand Yale’s numbers are a little light because its grads are too busy running the universe. But a prospective law student just read that Yale is only slightly better than going to Campbell Law.

There are no words. Concussed carnival folk dispense better career advice.

The 10 Most Underrated Law Schools [Bloomberg Business]
Ranking Law Schools, 2015: Student Aptitude, Employment Outcome, Law Review Citations [SSRN]
Five Charts That Show You Should Apply to Law School This Year [Bloomberg Business]

Earlier: Top 50 Law Schools