Law Schools

U.S. News To Roll Out Brand New Law School Ranking

Will this affect your law school's ranking?

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We hope that you’re ready, because it’s almost the most wonderful time of the year for law schools. That’s right, the 2019 U.S. News law school rankings will likely be published in about a month’s time. For those of you who are just itching for some rankings news right now, don’t you worry, because we’ve got you covered.

We recently learned that U.S. News will some be coming out with a brand spanking new law school ranking. Here’s more from U.S. News rankings guru Bob Morse:

U.S. News & World Report is expanding its Best Law Schools data collection with the goal of creating a new ranking that would evaluate the scholarly impact of law schools across the U.S.

The intent is to analyze each law school’s scholarly impact based on a number of accepted indicators that measure its faculty’s productivity and impact using citations, publications and other bibliometric measures.

U.S. News is collaborating with William S. Hein & Co. Inc., the world’s largest distributor of legal periodicals, to complete this analysis.

U.S. News will be tracking the citations and publications available on HeinOnline of each law school’s tenured or tenure-track faculty for the past five years to create its new scholarly impact ranking. According to Morse, the U.S. News scholarly impact ranking will “include[] such measures as mean citations per faculty member, median citations per faculty member and total number of publications.”

Now, if you think this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. U.S. News is now stamping its imprimatur upon a scholarly impact ranking that’s been published by a team of professors led by Gregory Sisk of U. St. Thomas Law, a ranking that’s based on the Leiter score ranking for the top third of law schools, developed and first published by Professor Brian Leiter of Chicago Law nearly two decades ago.

Morse notes that scholarly impact will not be a factor in the best law school rankings that are due to be published soon, but instead, will a separate ranking later this year. Whether the scholarly impact ranking will eventually be folded in to the overall law school ranking is a question that’s yet to have been completely answered, although Morse says U.S. News will “seriously consider making it a factor to measure faculty quality” for the rankings slated to come out in 2020.

U.S. News Considers Evaluating Law School Scholarly Impact [Morse Code / U.S. News]
U.S. News To Publish Law Faculty Scholarly Impact Ranking Based On 2014-2018 Citations [TaxProf Blog]
U.S. News to Launch New Way to Rank Law Schools [Law.com]

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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