Is T14 Dead? Is It T15? T13? Was T14 An Arbitrary Ranking All Along?

Elie Mystal and Joe Patrice debate the significance and meaning of the "T14" law schools.

Close-Up Of Number 14 Board Mounted On WallLast week, when we published the leaked U.S. News law school rankings that we received — and officially dropped today — the editorial staff at Above the Law had a knockdown, dragout argument that only the saddest legal nerds could love. With Georgetown slipping out of the top 14 and into a tie for the 15th best law school in the latest rankings, is it fair to describe the classic T14 distinction as “arbitrary”?

Seriously, we devoted a lot of digital ink to this dispute. Because how one feels about the nature of T14 impacts how they feel about the following options:

1. Is Texas now in the T14?
2. Are Texas and UCLA both properly in some new “T15” designation?
3. Did Georgetown just lose its chit and leave us with a T13?
4. Seriously, why did we ever make 14 an arbitrary brightline?

People really care a lot about this. Here’s a voicemail we received this morning:

Hey Above The Law…did you know what the T-14 actually is? Well, if not, here you go: there are only (and will probably ever be) 14 schools that have ever been in the top 10 law schools in the country – making them the T-14. This is information that came from a former dean of admissions of an actual T-14. So, no, UT-Austin is not a new T-14!

The former dean of admissions at a T14 doesn’t want anyone else considered T14? Shocking. Of course everyone knows the schools who occupied the top 14 slots — until this year — were the same schools in the top 14 every year of the USNWR rankings. The rank order may change year in and year out, but they always held those top slots. That’s why my colleagues David Lat and Elie Mystal don’t think T14 could be branded an “arbitrary” distinction. From a Gchat we had last week:

David: Elie makes the point, which I agree with, that maybe we should take “arbitrary” out of the post.

Because it’s not arbitrary in that they were the top 14 since the start of the rankings.

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True, but whether or not something is “arbitrary” depends on what’s being defined. “Godfather Part I, Godfather Part II, and Godfather Part III” makes for a perfectly accurate list of “Godfather movies” and a totally unreasonable list of “Great Gangster movies” that could only be thrown together by a moron just tossing out names of mob movies they’ve heard of. It’s based on a “system” but one without much regard for answer the question at hand.

Let’s be honest with each other here — “T14” didn’t really mean “schools that have always sat in the top 14” as much as it meant “schools a cut above the rest.”

Joe: The idea that there’s a *jump in quality* from 14 to 15 is completely arbitrary.

Using this consistency to draw a quality line is arbitrary. For example, we don’t talk about the T3 cola companies because the fact that Dr. Pepper consistently finishes a distant third and has for a long period of time doesn’t put it in the same discussion as the top two companies (or cover up the fact that Dr. Pepper is prune-flavored swill). They might be literally the “top 3,” but using that designation as a marker for quality would in fact be arbitrary in a world where Coke and Pepsi so thoroughly dominate all rivals.

When we used “T14” — as this publication and many others have for years — as shorthand for quality, telling students at times to “go T14 or go home” or fawning all over T14 professors as if they occupy rarified air, we may not have meant to say that there was a steep dropoff from 14 to 15, but that was certainly implied. Law schools with a national reputation capable of setting students up to get high-end jobs anywhere in the country do exist. They are not now, and have never been, sharply defined at the 14 cutoff. To utilize that rhetoric as shorthand was arbitrary.

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Did Georgetown really deserve to be discussed in the same breath as NYU? Was Texas ever really more than a shade away from Georgetown? These are questions we can finally grapple with now that the march of time has slain the magic number 14. And, yeah, we always employed YHS and CCN to draw distinctions, but far more often we lumped all 14 together as the schools it was “safe” to attend. Where’s that line now? 13? 14? 15? 20?

Elie here: The T-14 Is Dead: Long Live The T14, Big “Ten” style. Let me explain on the next page (where you vote in a poll as well)….