LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Jones: The U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores, 1998-2013. My favorite bit: Academics’ view of law schools has declined, even as lawyers and judges see them as improving, and this disparity is probably because of “strategic voting” on the U.S. News questionnaires:

Interestingly, the declines in academic reputation scores were in stark contrast to the substantial improvements that law schools enjoyed with respect to the reputation scores they received from lawyers and judges. The study revealed that 142 of the 172 law schools in the data set (83%) finished the period with higher lawyer/judge reputation scores. The improvements to these scores, furthermore, were often substantial. . . . The improvements to the lawyer/judge reputation scores would seem consistent with the recent advances in legal academia and the large expenditures that have been devoted to improving reputation scores. Why, then, have the academic reputation scores declined so significantly over the last sixteen years? This author contends in the article that the declines reflect the influence of the U.S. News rankings themselves. The U.S. News rankings now exert an inordinate degree of influence in the world of legal education. The academics who fill out the surveys each year undoubtedly understand that their schools cannot improve in the rankings without a corresponding decline by their competitors. The zero sum nature of the rankings, therefore, provides academics with a powerful incentive to employ increasingly stringent standards in their evaluations of competing institutions.

The lawyers and judges, of course, have little reason to vote strategically.