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The Ranking Sham

-- By BiyeremOkengwu - 09 Apr 2013

Intro

I remember when I first began my law school application process. This was an important step in my life so of course I did the most reasonable thing a person in my position could, I resorted to the internet to see what the rest of the world thought was a good law school. The magic name, “T-14” kept popping up everywhere. It seemed the Internet savvy legal scholars were of the opinion that if one did not make it into a top 14 law school these days then the jig was up. We were in a rough economy and only those golden 14 law schools who had always held that top 14 spots in the rankings had the firepower to deliver jobs to their student.

The fallacy

Here I sit at Columbia Law School, ranked number 4 in the country, yet I still have anxiety about attaining a fulfilling job upon graduation. I have anxiety that this essay I am now writing will not tickle my professor in the right way and I will be left staring at a mediocre grade at the end of the semester. But should that matter? After all I am at the almighty Columbia Law School. A mediocre grade should not harm me since the protective cloak a T-14 school bestows upon their student supposedly blankets me. This is of course unless these rankings are a fallacy. The truth of the matter is that the legal market is over saturated and it does not matter what school you go to, some students will not be able to attain the sought after idiosyncratic Big Law job. There is no denying the fact that one at Harvard Law School as opposed to a John Marshall Law School, or similarly ranked institution, has a significantly better chance at landing the job they prefer but law schools now want to stretch this truth into meaning that if you make into these top law schools then the world will bow at your feet.

No one will ever bow at your feet! The general ranking system has to be done away with. All it does is give those at high ranked schools a false sense of security and those at lower ranked schools a sense of anxiety of succumbing to failure and loans they will never able to pay back. The ranking system did minimal damage in the golden law days when you only had to go to law school to attain a legal job but now this system is crippling the legal field. Then students had an array of jobs to choose from, now students are choosing law schools for the wrong reasons and not institutions they believe will make them a “good” lawyer. Students are throwing applications at institutions they feel will get them employment upon graduation and not necessarily institutions they feel they mesh best with or will put them in a position to be the best lawyer that they can be. Questions such as “what region do I want to practice in” and “what area of law do I want to specialize in” seem to matter less to law school applicants these days; at the very least it mattered very little to me.

Missing factor

The U.S News uses 12 factors to rank law schools; perhaps they are missing a very important factor. I argue that a very important, if not the most important, question has been glanced over by U.S News. How many law professors at law schools nation wide have actually started and managed a successful law practice? Even if we were to set the bar a little lower and ask how many of the law professors at these law institutions have actually practiced law we would still be left with a disturbingly low number. Extensive experience in the practicing in the legal field is even disvalued by professors traveling down the tenure route as well as law schools hiring. It is baffling to me that a professor, who has never argued in a courtroom under those stressful conditions or sat on the other end of a negotiation, is who is mentoring me to be a lawyer and advocate for another individual or institution. Law schools should begin to move away from seeking to be “perceived as legitimate by their colleagues in the arts and sciences” and provide their students the actual skills necessary to be a good law rather than the fallacy of being satisfactory because they came from a “top law school.”

Defining a good teacher

How we define a good law teacher has to develop and change with the times. We as a legal field need professors who helped pave the way for a number of different subsets of law but these academics should not be the ones teaching students who want to actually practice law and not merely do research. Legal training should be divided into two fields with legal scholars instructing students who seek careers in academia and professors with extensive experience practicing mentoring students who want to practice law. The level of aptitude of both types of faculty members should be a crucial and heavily weighted factor in the ranking of law schools.

Conclusion

If we are going to use a system that subjects higher-level institutions to a grading scheme then they should be fairly assessed on all qualities. Future lawyers looking to pick a law school should be incentivized to select a school based on where they thing they will be given the skills and knowledge they desire to do what they wish to do in the legal field rather than just picking a institution they feel they will then be able to get a job and begin the loan payment process.

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