Law profs just virtue-signaled their way toward irrelevance

This is the first of two law prof-bashing posts today.

I have previously explained how several law schools copied Yale and “boycotted” the US News law school rankings.  I use quotes around that word because the schools weren’t really boycotting – or even withdrawing from – the rankings.  Rather, they were just succumbing to the irresistible urge to copy Yale and signal their virtue in the process, often to the point of sheer absurdity.  They just can’t help themselves.  And US News responded to all of this professorial griping by changing its ranking methodology.  The new rankings are available here.

Copying Yale and virtue signaling are two things that the wormy legal academy loves doing, so it was pretty easy to spot these events as they unfolded.  However, what I didn’t see happening was that the legal academy was, rather hilariously, screwing itself in the process.

Before the changes to the methodology, law profs actually controlled a huge part of the rankings.  For example, a full 25% of a school’s US News rank used to be based on “peer reputation score,” i.e., how law profs ranked the law schools.  Now, after the change in methodology, that number has been cut in half and is equal to the “lawyers-judges reputation score.”  Law profs must be flabbergasted that the opinions of mere practitioners – tradesmen, if you will – are given the same weight as the opinions of the professoriate.  Other components of the methodology were also tied directly to law professors, and those have been cut as well.

This is actually a positive change, because what law profs think of other law profs, i.e., the peer reputation score, isn’t worth a hill of beans.  As my next law prof-bashing post explains, law profs favor profs who have never practiced law, probably aren’t even licensed attorneys, and sometimes don’t even have a law degree.  That’s the state of legal education today, so it’s a very good thing that law profs’ opinions have been severely diminished when ranking law schools.  It’s just an extra bonus that law profs have unwittingly diminished their own opinions, i.e., they have done this to themselves!

You can read all about this ironic and hilarious state of affairs in the Excess of Democracy blog post that has one of the most insightful and poignant titles I’ve ever seen:  "Law school faculty have aggressively and successfully lobbied to diminish the importance of law school faculty in the USNWR rankings."  

Brilliant!  On top of that, the law prof author at Excess of Democracy actually saw it coming, and warned his fellow profs about it, well before it happened.