A NEW WAY TO RANK LAW SCHOOLS.

At present, law-school rankings function mostly as sales and branding mechanisms rather than providing an actual managerial report that reflects institutional performance. They speak very little, if at all, to the way a school is run operationally and its specific strategic plans.

Moreover, law-school rankings are backward looking: The reviewers and organizers of the surveys are mostly media staff, and their objective is to market and sell the rankings report, as well as to generate advertising spending, newsstand sales, subscriptions, cross-selling, and “hits” for digital data purposes. They flatter a handful of schools, while the rest languish year after year for no apparent reason.

The magazines and media companies that run the annual rankings are not able or qualified to tell you very much about the content of each of the law-school programs they examine. (There isn’t much they can tell you about standard law courses, which merely conform to Bar requirements.) Instead, the rankings honor university endowments, investment and donor activity, and the depth and magnitude of corporate and governmental cross-interests. (Harvard, Texas, and Yale are effective hedge funds, with over $30 billion each in investable assets.)

In an interesting coincidence, the Yale Law School, generally ranked for decades as “#1,” recently decided to pull out of the U.S. News & World Report law-school ranking program. (It actually can’t “withdraw,” but that’s another matter.) Suddenly, the entire rankings status quo seems suspect.

Maybe it always was.