Law Schools

New Law School Rankings Place NYU In Top Spot

Which law school boasts the best overall faculty?

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There are many ways to come up with the top law school in the country. Here at Above the Law, we carefully craft a formula to balance the out-of-pocket costs to the student with the professional opportunities they get with their law school degree. U.S. News, on the other hand, counts how many books are in the library.

There are fine rankings on both sides.

A new study endeavors to rank law schools by the quality of their overall faculty “team.” It’s not an entirely new concept, but where J.B. Heaton’s project “Who Fields the Best Team? A (Better) Measure of the Top Ten U.S. Law Schools by Faculty Impact” differs from prior stabs at this metric is in focusing on faculty excellence across specialties. Most law students don’t walk through the door knowing exactly where their career will take them — the law school with the best experts in a number of different specialties provides students with the best foundation for later success.

In this paper, I present a new measure of academic distinction that judges law schools by the best “team” the school can put on the field, where “positions” on the team are specialties and schools with a ranked scholar in that specialty get a higher score than a school without a ranked scholar. Each school must fill each position, so that having a number of high-citation scholars in a high-citation area is of limited use, like having four quarterbacks but no good defensive end, to use a football analogy. Rather, given the multiplicity of legal specialties, like the multiplicity of roles on a sports team, the question here is what schools put the best team on the field.

Citation count isn’t a perfect way to identify a quality professor. Heaton’s study begins from the same premise as the Sisk-Leiter rankings that citation count proves “a scholar has interesting things to say over and again.” It certainly can mean that. Or it could mean a law professor is continually bombarding the space with content. Legal scholarship will eventually find its way into a footnote so writing more will definitely drag up the citation count without necessarily indicating a competent instructor. But it’s certainly closer to accurately measuring legal scholars than RateMyProfessor, so here we are.

And what happens when we rank law schools based on the quality of their faculty across sub-disciplines? NYU comes out on top, that’s what happens.

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When Heaton pared down the specialties to only the “core” professional offerings… NYU won again. So any way you slice it, NYU has the best team of legal scholars out there.

Prospective students may not be changing their law school plans over this ranking, but law schools should take this experiment seriously. Heaton’s work provides a roadmap to building a more balanced faculty by placing a faculty’s weak spots in sharp relief. And prospective legal academics may want to focus on some of these underserved specialties.

But mostly, let’s just congratulate NYU for building the Golden State of law school faculties.

Be sure to check out the whole paper here.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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