Hello, it’s time for another round of the classic gameshow “we must measure!” In this game show, much like the Freudian original, the bigger your measurement, the better off you’ll feel about yourself. Although not really.
This time, let’s talk rankings. Or citation counts! Or maybe how tall the average faculty member is at each school! Damn it, let’s measure something!
As you recall from last week, I described the fascinating world of the top 10 law reviews. That world showed that 80 percent of the law review articles in the top 10 law reviews are from alums from those same schools.
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Before that, I have discussed other problems with other ways to measure the size of each faculty member’s … productivity. As you might recall, back in 2018, I discussed a paper by Gregory Sisk, Nicole Caitlin, Katherine Veenis, and Nicole Zeman, Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties in 2018: Updating the Leiter Score Ranking for the Top Third (August 13, 2018). Here’s what I wrote:
The article lists the most cited members of the legal academy, who apparently mostly delve in Constitutional Law and Law & Economics. Sisk et. al. also provide the most cited members of each school’s faculty, with each school rated by scholarly impact. As Brian Leiter informed me, it’s a citation study.
But it’s more than that to me. See, there’s a problem. If you look at the top most cited scholars, they are mostly white men. If you look at the top five schools in terms of scholarly impact, you find five women and eight people of color. You don’t find anyone who graduated from a lower-ranked school (my proxy for class). Why are women, people of color, and people from lower socioeconomic status having trouble getting cited?
Now U.S. News wants to get into the scholarly impact game. It wants to start a second ranking based upon citation counts. I assume that the notion here would be U.S. News and World Report would become the definitive ranking of scholarly impact. It would be like the U.S. News law school rankings. The new rankings would measure the school’s worth. People would rely on it in terms of perpetuating the hierarchy. The top 10 would never change substantially. It would be, well, everything wrong with law school rankings! Oh, and if you do something to annoy U.S. News, it might punish you no matter how noble you’re being.
At this point, we can definitely say whose scholarship impacts society the most. It’ll be the one that gets cited the most. That’s not necessarily the scholarship that changes law or makes society better off. As reported by InsideHigherEd, a U.S. News spokesperson said this (emphasis mine): “U.S. News is going to emphasize scholarly impact by using different indicators that measure citations, not volume… Prospective students are looking for schools with the highest quality law school faculty who are making an impact in legal academia and the law….”
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See, I could have sworn law students are looking for a quality education without mortgaging their future too much, with the ability to get have a rewarding career after graduation. Who would the new rankings really serve, apart from U.S. News? My guess is it will serve the egos of professors who live for those rankings. It will not serve the students in any way.
Also, we can also pretty darn well guess how these rankings will turn out. It’s not like, apart from the random twist of one school, the rankings do anything else apart from reconfirm the hierarchy of U.S. News. This indeed may be the U.S. News plan. Its law school rankings and scholarship impact rankings will likely reinforce each other. Please bow to the trueness and rightness of U.S. News rankings.
In any event, I look forward to all the new … measuring. I, for one, get excited when schools demonstrate the size of their … scholarly impact. I can’t wait for all the scholarly impact “law porn” to come out, hopefully in an expensive publication mailed to me that ends up in my recycling bin.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a “top 100 law school.” You can see more of his musings here. He is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at [email protected].