Finally, I can make a niche longpost about entertaining drama in one of MY communities.

Helpful Background Info

A news magazine that no one actually reads, U.S. News and World Report (USNWR), has somehow positioned itself as the only law school ranking that anyone cares about. Its methodology has long been criticized for focusing more on prestige and the qualifications of students who attend schools instead of outcomes after graduation. My position is that the rankings only have value as a rough heuristic, and fail to adequately capture the diversity of goals and successful outcomes people can have from law school.

The top 14 schools in that ranking have historically been relatively stable, leading to an informal tier system with the "T14" at the top. Schools may shift around within the T14, and Georgetown (#14, usually) sometimes drops to #15, but on the whole, this is a rather stable ranking—normally. Within the T14, there are generally sub-tiers: Yale, Stanford, and Harvard are usually the top three, with Yale at #1, for instance.

What Happened This Year?

Chaos.

USNWR changed its rankings to prioritize employment and bar passage more than they used to, and to deprioritize prestige and applicant statistics.

Stanford and Yale are now tied for first. Harvard fell to fifth (technically it had already fallen from #3 last year, but it's still going down). NYU outranks Columbia. Georgetown fell from #14 to #15, replaced by UCLA. The University of Minnesota is now #16—a state school from the midwest! Boston University fell 10 places!

Wait, this just sounds like a lot of elitist squabbling over small changes in relative prestige

Yup!

That doesn't stop applicants from calling the new rankings "not only absurd, but . . . dangerous" because they might lead someone who is basing the entirety of their decision on where to go to law school on rank, which could lead that person to make a suboptimal decision (assuming this hypothetical applicant's entire reason for going to law school is to be a corporate lawyer in NYC¹).

There is a LOT of casting doubt on individual rankings going on—how could Wake Forest possibly outrank Arizona State?!—and the vast majority of it seems to be based on a combination of vibes and rates of students becoming corporate lawyers in NYC (the only employment outcome that matters, clearly). There is also a lot of coastal elitism—how could it possibly be that a state school in the midwest² is a peer to, if not better than, traditionally elite private universities on the East Coast?

My Take

I'm here for the chaos.

I hope that this further erodes any stock that people put into these rankings from some random magazine that we've³ decided matter. As someone going to one of those fancy private east coast law schools, a public school closer to home would have been just fine for many of the outcomes most folks are realistically gonna get. I'm on board with just about anything that makes people actually think about what they want from law school rather than just going "which number smaller?"

Also, to any law school applicants reading this: biglaw pays that much because they work you like a dog (furries reading this: not in the fun way) for the causes that are actively killing the planet. In other words, if they thought they could get you to do the work for less, they would. It should not be the measure of successful employment post-graduation.

1. This is my snarky way of referring to what's called "biglaw," meaning large law firms with a ton of attorneys that tend to pay the most out of law school. Unsurprisingly, they can pay that much and employ that many attorneys because they represent wealth in court.

2. Besides the University of Michigan.

3. Referring to the set of people who care about legal academia in the US.

I'm writing a paper that in part deals with how conservatives talk about transgender healthcare. It engages with some conservative scholarship that makes demonstrably untrue statements about that topic. Despite the fact that I had clear evidence of both malice and an untrue statement, I had to think hard about whether calling these statements a lie was crossing some sort of genre-related line.

We've developed a genre of writing where even calling a clearly malicious untruth a "lie" is something one has to think hard about before doing. This sucks.