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ABA Report Examines U.S. News & World Reports Law School Rankings

Report of the Special Committee on the U.S. News and World Report Rankings Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar

  • “On February 17, 2010, ABA President Carolyn Lamm asked the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to examine rankings of law schools. She did so to follow through on a Resolution of the ABA House of Delegates that the ABA “examine any efforts to publish national, state, territorial, and local rankings of law firms and law schools.”…We commissioned a professional law librarian, Dorie Bertram of the Washington University School of Law, to prepare a comprehensive annotated bibliography on the ranking of law schools. We attach a copy of that extensive bibliography to this report to assist the ABA in considering this subject. As a review of that document shows, there is now a wide array of rankings of law schools in the United States. Each rankings scheme employs idiosyncratic criteria and methodology to compare law schools. No law school performs at the top or bottom of all rankings schemes. Nevertheless, the scholarship indicates that the U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of law schools overwhelmingly dominates the public discourse on how law schools compare to one another. As a result, U.S. News rankings have assumed ever increasing importance to any law school that wishes to attract students and faculty and to retain support from alumni and university leaders. The criteria U.S. News uses for rankings now has a powerful influence over the management and design of American legal education. That influence is not entirely benign, as is indicated in the scholarship.”
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