Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0003-2381-1028

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Keywords

Rankings, Law schools, FLAIR rankings, HeinOnline, Law review citations, Impact, Legal education market

Abstract

Although the very concept of law school rankings is currently under fire, rankings abolitionism is misplaced. Given the number, diversity, and geographic dispersion of the more than 190 law schools fully ac­credited by the American Bar Association, rankings are essential to en­able various stakeholders to make comparisons between schools. How­ever, the current rankings landscape is dire. The U.S News law school rankings rely on poorly designed, highly subjective surveys to gauge "reputational strength," rather than looking to easily available, objec­tive citation data that is more valid and reliable. Would-be usurpers of U.S. News use better data but make other arbitrary choices that limit and distort their rankings. One flaw common to U.S. News and those who would displace it is the fetishization of minor differences in place­ment that do not reflect actual differences in substance. This infor­mation is worse than trivial: it is actively misleading. This Article pro­poses a new set of law school rankings free from all of these defects.

The Forward-Looking Academic Impact Rankings (''FLAIR rank­ings'') introduced in this Article are based on data that shows how many times law review articles by each of 5,139 individual faculty members at 191 American law schools have been cited by other law review articles in the last five years. The FLAIR rankings can be used as an objective guide to the relative academic impact of law schools, or as a component in broader objective rankings. The FLAIR rankings are based on publicly available, reliable, and objective data obtained from law school websites and the research platform HeinOnline. The FLAIR rankings include all fully ARA-accredited law schools, unlike alternative rankings of academic influence that are selective, often arbitrarily so. Moreover, the FLAIR rankings are designed to impart meaningful information by clustering schools into tiers based on their distance from the mean of all schools and deemphasizing ordinal rankings. Thus, the FLAIR rankings enable readers to make rational comparisons between law schools, rather than simply creating a hier­archy for hierarchy's sake.

First Page

763

Publication Title

Florida State University Law Review

Comments

© Matthew Sag 2023.

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