WSJ on Law School Rankings

Interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal: Law Schools Also Ranked by Blogs Now, by Amir Efrati:

Since they first began appearing annually in 1990, U.S. News's law-school rankings have been the go-to list for students venturing into the field. While the magazine's business-school rankings face competition from the likes of BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal, the magazine has essentially had a monopoly in the law-school realm. But its list has also been heavily criticized by deans and in scores of law-journal articles. Among the complaints from prospective students: In terms of employment, the survey focuses on whether grads are employed but not where they are employed. Flipping burgers would count. In the last two years, at least a dozen upstart Web sites, academic papers and blogs have stepped in with surveys of their own to feed the hunger for information on everything from the quality of the faculty to what a school's diploma might be worth to future employers.

The WSJ article links to nine alternatives to the U.S. News law school rankings, including the article I co-authored with Bernie Black, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006), and the web site I publish with Brian Leiter and Joe Hodnicki, Leiter's Law School Rankings. The WSJ article contains this nifty chart comparing the Top 10 law schools under these various metrics [click on chart to enlarge]:

[Cross-posted on TaxProf Blog.]