Leiter Rankings in Scholarly Impact Study Forum

[minuit]

Have you all seen this yet? What do you make of it? These are 2010 rankings that just came out, ranking schools based on faculty scholarly impact.

http://www.leiterrankings.com/new/2010_ ... pact.shtml

[lawyering]

Have you all seen this yet? What do you make of it?

http://www.leiterrankings.com/new/2010_ ... pact.shtml

<3 yale.

[Rawlsian]

Vandy> Cornell, Duke, UM, UVA, Penn, UCLA, UT, GULC

[kittenmittons]

Vandy> Cornell, Duke, UM, UVA, Penn, UCLA, UT, GULC

They tend to favor smaller faculties over larger faculties, which no doubt explains why schools like Texas and Virginia and Georgetown come out behind schools like Vanderbilt and Cornell, even though I don’t think any informed scholarly judgment would rate them that way.

[Geist13]

eh. This info is really only useful if you are set on academia (getting LOR from influential scholars), in which case if you're not at T6 it doesn't matter anyways. Some of the top scholars will indeed be excellent professors. Some of them will also be dreadful professors. The influence of their papers and books says nothing about how they are in the classroom. We're going to class, not writing dissertations. It's cool that the school I deposited at is in the top 20 and has multiple professors listed in the specialty I'm most interested in (but, if you do your research you should already know that your school has good professors in an area you're interested in). But really, I don't think this list is that important unless you dream of the academy. If you do, just go to Yale.

[nealric]

The study also discounts profs whose impact lies outside the standard "publish or perish" realm of academia.

For example, GULC wouldn't get much impact "credit" for Neal Katyal (who argued most of the Gitmo cases in front of the SCOTUS and was recently appointed by Obama as deputy solicitor general) because his focus wasn't getting published in law reviews. GULC has a lot of people like that due the DC location.

[Rawlsian]

It also has this problem:

In some cases, older faculty account for quite a lot of the result (e.g., three of NYU’s ten most cited faculty are between the ages of 76 and 80; four of Columbia’s ten most cited are 70 or older).

[sumus romani]

Basically, Leiter is offering an objective alternative to reputation rankings. But at least for lots of people, law school choice largely comes down to job prospects, so reputation rankings are more important (even though they have so many problems).

[nealric]

Basically, Leiter is offering an objective alternative to reputation rankings. But at least for lots of people, law school choice largely comes down to job prospects, so reputation rankings are more important (even though they have so many problems).

I don't think Leiter is trying to replace standard rankings per-se, he is just offering up additional data based on different criteria. Citations probably matter a lot more to someone who is planning on teaching law school as opposed to someone going to law school.

[Rawlsian]

Basically, Leiter is offering an objective alternative to reputation rankings. But at least for lots of people, law school choice largely comes down to job prospects, so reputation rankings are more important (even though they have so many problems).

I don't think Leiter is trying to replace standard rankings per-se, he is just offering up additional data based on different criteria. Citations probably matter a lot more to someone who is planning on teaching law school as opposed to someone going to law school.

Yea, I like his rankings. I'm likely headed to Vandy, so I'm always on the look out for outside validation.

[sumus romani]

Basically, Leiter is offering an objective alternative to reputation rankings. But at least for lots of people, law school choice largely comes down to job prospects, so reputation rankings are more important (even though they have so many problems).

I don't think Leiter is trying to replace standard rankings per-se, he is just offering up additional data based on different criteria. Citations probably matter a lot more to someone who is planning on teaching law school as opposed to someone going to law school.

Yeah, I said 'alternative' and it is probably the wrong word. I agree that he is offering something closer to a supplement than an alternative.

[Twit]

Trolling through Leiter's stuff today, and I've come to this conclusion: his agenda is to establish that the T4 is a thing, and that it is: Y-H-S/Chi. He abhors the fact that Columbia is ranked higher than Chi and really thinks that Chi is on par with S and probably H. He's got a lot data to back it up.

Granted, however, he gets to pick the data that's be used, but that's what argumentation is all about, isn't it?

[Excellent117]

Why the f**k is scholarly impact even important?

[TaipeiMort]

Why the f**k is scholarly impact even important?

Because if you want academia you need faculty members to champion for you.

[TaipeiMort]

Trolling through Leiter's stuff today, and I've come to this conclusion: his agenda is to establish that the T4 is a thing, and that it is: Y-H-S/Chi. He abhors the fact that Columbia is ranked higher than Chi and really thinks that Chi is on par with S and probably H. He's got a lot data to back it up.

Granted, however, he gets to pick the data that's be used, but that's what argumentation is all about, isn't it?

Actually, Leiter is a pretty laid back, hilarious guy. You need to calm down. Chicago does have a stronger academic faculty than Columbia. Columbia has a stronger practitioner faculty. They are different approaches to education. It doesn't make either school better.

[Doorkeeper]

Trolling through Leiter's stuff today, and I've come to this conclusion: his agenda is to establish that the T4 is a thing, and that it is: Y-H-S/Chi. He abhors the fact that Columbia is ranked higher than Chi and really thinks that Chi is on par with S and probably H. He's got a lot data to back it up.

Granted, however, he gets to pick the data that's be used, but that's what argumentation is all about, isn't it?

Actually, Leiter is a pretty laid back, hilarious guy. You need to calm down. Chicago does have a stronger academic faculty than Columbia. Columbia has a stronger practitioner faculty. They are different approaches to education. It doesn't make either school better.

Yea, I'm actually going to back Taipei on this one. Chicago and NYU (although NYU has the old faculty problem) both have stronger academic faculties than Columbia.

[stillwater]

Leiter is a hack.

[Twit]

Actually, Leiter is a pretty laid back, hilarious guy. You need to calm down. Chicago does have a stronger academic faculty than Columbia. Columbia has a stronger practitioner faculty. They are different approaches to education. It doesn't make either school better.

Nope. I actually think that Leiter is on to something. His methodology is as good if not better than USNWR's and it presents a pretty persuasive argument that UChi should not be overlooked.

I don't think it's fair to say that Leiter is just trying to show that UChi has a stronger academic faculty; he has numerous rankings on national firm placement and UChi does well in them.

I think Leiter is doing a good thing.

[moneybagsphd]

Leiter is a hack.

[hung jury]

Leiter is a hack.

[09042014]

Basically, Leiter is offering an objective alternative to reputation rankings. But at least for lots of people, law school choice largely comes down to job prospects, so reputation rankings are more important (even though they have so many problems).

Academic reputation ratings have zero impact on job prospects. And professional reputation rankings don't seem to match employment trends.

[hung jury]

Also, anyone notice Leiter recently decided to troll the internet to note that Chicago is #1 in the always crucial metric "FACULTY QUALITY BASED ON MEMBERSHIP IN THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES."

http://www.leiterrankings.com/new/2012_AAAS.shtml

I mean, it wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't the only update to his "rankings" since January 2011
(that wonderful piece, by the way, decided to stretch all the way back to Chicago's glory years when discussing tenure track appointments).

[d.schoenfeld16]

All these rankings seem to be good for is getting a job in the Obama Administration where you get to participate first-hand in the downfall of our country as some hack regulatory czar.

[stillwater]

All these rankings seem to be good for is getting a job in the Obama Administration where you get to participate first-hand in the downfall of our country as some hack regulatory czar.

Props for shamelessly politicizing the thread.

[FlightoftheEarls]

Also, anyone notice Leiter recently decided to troll the internet to note that Chicago is #1 in the always crucial metric "FACULTY QUALITY BASED ON MEMBERSHIP IN THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCES."

http://www.leiterrankings.com/new/2012_AAAS.shtml

I mean, it wouldn't be so egregious if it wasn't the only update to his "rankings" since January 2011
(that wonderful piece, by the way, decided to stretch all the way back to Chicago's glory years when discussing tenure track appointments).

Don't forget his arbitrary ranking of the "Placement in Law Teaching" that he did only in 2006. You know, the year where Chicago happened to beat out SLS? But, of course, since Chicago's placement has declined significantly relative to YSH (in that order) in recent years, he only recently in 2011 decided to look at historic placement dating back to 1995 when Chicago was still crushing its numbers. Similar, single-year studies are nowhere to be found apart from this isolated ranking where it looked particularly favorable to the school that pays his salary.

In all seriousness, anybody writing academic papers like this with such blatantly cherry-picked statistics would be laughed out of the profession. While the "law school ranking" environment is clearly different from his day-to-day of legal academia, the fact that he manages to do it so casually within this environment and retains any credibility is beyond me. But this is TLS and he's a big-name professor at a "T4" law school -- people will cling to his rankings like gospel.