Tag Archive for 'law schools'

Use Blind Tasting To (Help) Rank Law Schools

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 07/24/08
in Law School Rankings
. 11 Comments

So, I’ve got wine on the brain. Mrs. Sherpa and I recently spent a long weekend in the Napa Valley tasting wine and enjoying some time away from the craziness of life.

Since I’ve been back the Freakonomics blog has posted several times on the blind tasting of wine and how most people can’t really tell the difference between a $10 bottle and a $150 one. The discussion is infused with some interesting studies on the topic and, Levitt’s ultimate conclusion that the more you know about wine the more you end up spending on it.

I was swishing this idea around in my head when I read this choice quote from the Case Western Law Dean criticizing the U.S. News law school rankings:

[I]t seems beyond debate that it is truly depressing that law deans, who have so many important educational issues to address, feel the pressure they undeniably feel to make important decisions about their schools in response to a popular magazine’s educationally unsophisticated decisions about ranking methodology.

Read the whole piece. It’s good, if not real original (at least for those of us critical of the rankings). The fact that his piece is, in part, a response to a U.S. News proposal to count the entry credentials of evening students in rankings is for another post. What seems to be lacking in these rankings is a more personal, less manipulable way to measure law school quality.

So why don’t we do what the prominent wine critics do - line up a bunch of glasses, do a blind tasting, and rate purely based on the taste of the wine? The critics supposedly do not know the producer of the wine or its vintage. Just it’s type (syrah, merlot, etc.).

As part of the U.S. News calculation I propose appointing a panel of experts - legal scholars, judges, attorneys, etc - and have them take several steps to measure the quality of education. This panel could listen to classes without knowing who is teaching or at what school, but it would know the area of law. Rate based on overall quality of instruction, discussion, etc. The panel might also read law review articles or student papers to gauge the quality of scholarship being done and promoted at the school.

Perhaps I still have some tannin residue in my brain, but it strikes me that adding a component like this (not to mention Dr. Bombay’s law school value calculation) could help to bring a more personal, less manipulable component to the rankings. Or maybe the U.S. News team just needs a nice Napa Cab when they’re tabulating the rankings.

A Two-Year JD Program?

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 06/23/08
in At The Law Schools and News You Can Use
. 2 Comments

Interesting stuff… The WSJ Law Blog reported on Friday about Northwestern’s plan to offer a two-year JD program. WSJ quoting the dean of Northwestern Law School:

Tuition: Don’t expect to save money. Northwestern announced the program but won’t answer the $42,672 question of whether the compressed plan will be cheaper. Van Zandt told the Law Blog that, rather than the prospect of a cheaper degree, the financial attraction of the program is more likely to be the ability to be earning a salary a year earlier. (And yes, the $42k figure is NU’s annual tuition.)

Time This is a five-semester program that will begin in May. The 25 to 60 students expected to join will take the same number of credits as students in the three-year program. They’ll take extra courses each semester and pick up one or two credits through mini-courses between semesters.

Curriculum While the two-year option will have the same curriculum as the traditional program, the two-year students will be the first to test two new required courses: quantitative reasoning, including accounting, finance and statistics; and the dynamics of legal services behavior, including skills such as teamwork, leadership and project management.

Admission Applicants will be required to have two or three years of “substantive work experience” after college. People with work experience are likely to have “the good time management” necessary to success in the program, Van Zandt told Insider Higher Ed.

Not being a traditional JD student myself it’s hard to say whether this is a good or bad development or whether, in the words of one critic it will produce “substandard lawyers.” Other than the shorter time horizon, it’s hard to see what value this adds for the student. Or maybe that’s value enough?

On Newsstands - US News Rankings

Published
by
Casebook Sherpa
on 03/31/08
in Law School Rankings
. 0 Comments

They’ve been out for about a week already, but the US News & World Report’s 2008 Law School Rankings are out on newsstands today. Our school’s response is muted and focuses (correctly in this PR Guy’s view) on the school’s year-to-year improvement. (Am I reading it right that we’re not in the Top 10 for clinical programs???)

If you’re interested in methodology of rankings, we’re working on our own Value Ranking. We’re still working on the formula and tabulating results, so if you have thoughts, fire away.