If Yale is #1 in U.S. News, Is It the Best Law School?

[by Bill Henderson, crossposted to ELS Blog]

In a provocative post entitled “Is the End Near for Yale’s Dominance“,Brian Leiter reports one insider’s assessment that Yale may lose threeor four additional faculty members.  If that happens, surely Harvard,with its recent lateral hiring sprees, will be the best law school inthe country–right? Brian thinks that predictions of Yale’s decline arepremature.  I agee.  But in the process Brian implicitly highlights aninteresting problem: what exactly does it mean to be the “best” lawschool? 

Here are the vexing facts:  on a per capital basis, Yale places more people in academia and Supreme Court clerkships than any other law school;  Yale’s acceptance rate is 7.3% versus 11.8% for Harvard; yet, over the last decade, the average U.S. News academic reputation score for the two schools are exactly–yes, exactly–equal: 4.840 for Harvard, 4.840 for Yale. 

Is it possible that Yale is #1 because, well, Yale is #1 — and hasbeen every year since USN began publication?  Brian refers to U.S. News”small school bias”.  He is right.  Because of Yale’s massive endowmentand small student size, it enjoys a per-pupil expenditure that isroughly 1/3 its total tuition price.  According to a simulation modelof the 2008 U.S. News rankings, which Andy Morriss and I recently constructed, Harvard would not overtake Yale even if: 

• Harvard’s median LSAT climbed to 180 and its median UGPA hit 4.0;
• Harvard’s academic and lawyer-judge reputation scores were both a perfect 5.0;
• Harvard’s acceptance rate plunged to less than 5%.

In fact, even with these changes, Yale would still have a niceleadership cushion.  [Note:  Similar anomalous math was noted by TedSeto in his classic essay, Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings, SMU L Rev (2007).]

Yet, Yale’s dominance keeps things simple.  Applicants signal theirelitestatus by enrolling at Yale.  Judges, in turn, derive prestige byhiringYale graduates, even though they mockingly complain that Yale clerksknow very little law.  And faculty favor Yale graduates because itvalidatesour own sense of eliteness and institutional upward movement.  We canrationalize Yale’s dominance in terms of scholarship, but the realendgame is the allocation of positional goods.  It is so easy to gettoo caught up on the hamster wheel of envy and prestige withoutrealizing that the energy expended does not necessarily produceanything of lasting social value.

Of course, each of us is free to determine our own merit criteria. I think  the “best” law school is the one where faculty are willing tomake inordinate personal sacrifices for the benefit of the collectiveenterprise–and where aspiring lawyers leave the law school skilled,confident, ethical, and ensconced in a powerful professional networkthat opens doors and values public service.  In turn, alumnus aresufficiently grateful for the transformative experiencethey received that theyare willing to underwrite the law school’s mission and subsidize thisopportunityfor future generations.  This vision requires a greater focus oninternal rather than external metrics.  For us human beings, that is noeasy trick.