Here’s the introduction to their piece
The U.S. News & World Report rankings are a powerful force in the world of law schools. Deans’ careers can rise or fall on their schools’ rankings, which affect everything from student recruitment to alumni giving to faculty retention. So when U.S. News announced in 2019 that it was considering creating a new ranking for law schools, heads turned across the legal academy.
Bloomberg Law received an email Aug. 19 from U.S. News stating that in June 2021 it decided that it would not proceed with its previously proposed law school scholarly impact ranking. However, we feel it is important to discuss concerns legal academics have about such proposals.
The crux of the U.S. News proposal was to develop a new measure of a law school’s prestige based on the “impact” of the scholarship produced by its faculty. This impact score would be calculated by counting the number of times a professor’s work was cited by other professors, and perhaps by courts.
Skeptics immediately raised objections. The most general challenge is that judgments of scholarly merit are inevitably subjective and cannot be quantified. Others expressed concern about biases against women, scholars of color, interdisciplinary scholars, and those in less-cited research areas.
But the citation-based rankings have supporters as well. They argue that the new approach will bring some needed objectivity to a system that is biased in favor of the old-school powerhouses and leaves little room for entrepreneurial upstarts to improve their standing.
A Change Could Impact Faculty Recruiting, Promotion
As with many debates in academia, this might sound like a tempest in a teapot. But if U.S. News changes its ranking system, law schools will be pressured to alter how they recruit and promote faculty.
In particular, law schools will likely focus on professors with the most citations, instead of interdisciplinary credentials, peer-reviewed publications, or diversity. Ultimately, this affects who trains the next generation of lawyers and which ideas are circulated to courts and other legal decision-makers.
In a recent study of the law school lateral hiring market, we show that a focus on citations would result in dramatic changes in law school hiring. We find that the professors recruited into the top law schools are not necessarily the ones with the most citations. The citation counts of law professors who move to the most elite schools in the country—places like Harvard and Yale—are barely distinguishable from the rest of the field.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/rankings-shift-could-force-big-changes-at-u-s-law-schools
