Back in 2011, Cooley Law School commissioned a law school ranking that placed the school second overall, just a shade behind Harvard. That ranking is positively scientific compared to the results of our annual bracket tournament.
To recap, a bunch of law schools have bailed on U.S. News and World Report, refusing to provide key data that the publication uses in its rankings. There are a lot of reasons to criticize USNWR — and we’ve leveled all of those criticisms repeatedly — but at least it’s trying to put out a data-driven assessment. Without law school participation, the next round of rankings will lean on public perception and guesstimation, which is a terrible way to run an industry.
So we had readers vote for the top law school in a bracket format to performatively demonstrate how stupid a vibe-based ranking can be. While the USNWR rankings will most likely parrot past results (though some models suggest important shuffling among the elite schools) and pass everyone’s vague smell test, in reality they don’t shine much more light on the law school decision-making process than this competition.
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With almost 25 million bot-driven votes, ASS Law has won.
This means we can now create the definitive ordering based on tournament performance with ties broken by preliminary seeding.
(1) ASS Law
(2) Penn
(3) Northwestern
(4) Texas
(5) Harvard
(6) NYU
(7) Berkeley
(8) Georgetown
(9) Stanford
(10) Chicago
(11) Columbia
(12) UVA
(13) Michigan
(14) Duke
(15) Cornell
(16) Wash U.
(17) Yale
(18) UCLA
(19) Boston
(20) Vanderbilt
(21) USC
(22) Florida
(23) Minnesota
(24) BYU
(25) UNC
(26) GWU 25
(27) Alabama
(28) Notre Dame
(29) Iowa
(30) Georgia
(31) William & Mary
(32) ASU
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Congratulations. May God have mercy on your souls.
Joe 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. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.