Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

7-1-2015

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; Law & Society eJournals; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; Cognitive Science Network; Management Research Network

Abstract

This essay builds on a paper released last year that ranked law schools on three variables the median LSAT of entering students of the most recent class the most recently available employment outcome for each school's graduates and citations to each school's main law reviews over the past eight years This paper updates that study with LSAT median data for the class entering in fall 2014 employment data for the class graduating in 2014 ten months after graduation and the most recent law review citation data for 2007 through 2014 It studies 195 ABA approved law schoolsIn addition to using more recent data this study changes the method of combining those data Where the last paper used simple ranks for each variable and averaged them this study has a more granular approach to the data It converts each school's median LSAT score and the percentage of students employed in fulltime permanent JDrequired jobs ten months after graduation excluding schoolfunded positions and solo practitioners to standard scores In addition given the dramatic differences in number of law review citations among schools it employs a common log transformation of law review citations and then converts the transformed scores to standard scores The paper combines the first two scores to provide a twovariable ranking and then combines all three variables to provide a threevariable ranking The paper reports average scores for the threevariable ranking thus permitting examination of how close schools are to each other It also ranks the 195 ABAapproved law schools in the United States excluding the three schools in Puerto Rico that US News included in its rankings released in March 2015 And it compares the new two and three variable rankings to the US News provided ranks in March 2015 It identifies the schools that improve and decline the most with the new rankings

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