Like all law professors, I get mailings every day, especially in the fall, from law schools around the country, touting their visiting speakers, their faculty, their alumni, their special programs, and so on. This practice is plainly a result of the U.S. News law school rankings, 25% of which are based on a "peer reputation" survey. (US News sends a list with the names of all 180+ ABA-approved schools, with no other information, to 4 faculty at each law school, and asks evaluators to score the school's "reputation" based on the quality of faculty, programs, students, alumni, etc.).
There is not much concrete evidence that these mailings help law schools. NYU, for example, has been sending its hyperbolic alumni magazine to law faculty for a number of years, during which times its peer reputation scores have declined in US News (even though the quality of its faculty has improved!). My theory is that the NYU magazine was so absurdly over the top with hyperbole--a Stanford professor aptly dubbed it "law porn"--that it angered more folks than it impressed.
In 1998, my own school began doing its own mailings, though of a different kind. Our theory was that no law professor in his or her right mind has any interest in reading another school's alumni magazine (what do I care about NYU's alumni?), but law professors are almost always interested in what other law faculty are up to. So we created a special publication called "Recent Faculty News," that profiled our new faculty hires, as well as featuring recent faculty achievements (major publications, endowed lectures, etc.), and sent it to law faculty nationwide. (Law schools are larger than philosophy departments, and Texas, with 60+ full-time faculty and an endowment circa $170 million for the law school, is almost continually in the market for new faculty and thus makes new hires every year. While Texas may be a bit richer than most law schools, we're not atypical in the amount of hiring we do.)
Two bits of evidence that the Texas approach has worked reasonably well: first, our "peer reputation" in US News went from 14th in 1999 to 11th last year (during a period of time in which the faculty also got stronger); second, dozens and dozens of law schools around the country began producing similar documents. Instead of tedious alumni magazines, we increasingly get brochures about new faculty and faculty activities. Given my avocation, I find this interesting reading, but it's clear I'm not alone: scholars are interested in what their professional peers have been doing.
Anyway, a few days ago I got a mailing called "Faculty Footnotes" from the University of Southern California law school, that featured--what else?--new faculty and recent faculty activities. Even for this genre, it was a particularly interesting read. It reported four very nice new hires--Catherine Fisk from Loyola Law School (Los Angeles), Elizabeth Garrett from the University of Chicago, Gillian Hadfield from the University of Toronto, and Andrei Marmor from a research post in Israel--as well as the fact that Fisk had turned down an offer from Duke, Marmor from Northwestern, and that long-time USC faculty member, Erwin Chemerinsky, had also turned down a Duke offer. While the vitae of European scholars frequently list offers, it's less common for this to be so public in the US. I appreciated this candor, and there's no doubt that competing offers are a useful, if imperfect, indicator of faculty quality. (That USC's Dean is now Matthew Spitzer, a distinguished law and economics scholar, may have something to do with this new approach. Interesting sidenote: Spitzer himself turned down an offer from the University of Chicago Law School a few years back; he also has a place in the "hall of shame" for the University of Texas School of Law, since it turns out that a generation ago, we failed to make him an offer when he was a rookie job candidate!)
I think it's clear that USC is better than both Duke and Northwestern, and that judgment isn't that controversial, I suspect, among active legal scholars.
But USC is one of those law schools underrated by U.S. News & World Report, thanks to their screwball methodology (for more on their ranking methodology, see here). US News usually ranks them 17th or 18th, in the company of Minnesota and Vanderbilt. But both USC's student body and clearly its faculty is MUCH better than either Minnesota or Vanderbilt. (Let me add immediately that both these schools are very good, and I especially admire Vanderbilt's law school--they've got a spectacular dean, and have done lots of good hiring. When Texas thinks about whom to raid from good schools lower down "in the food chain" [as law professors call the law school hierarchy] we far more often find ourselves looking at the Vanderbilt faculty than, e.g., at Duke or Minnesota.)
What hurts USC in US News is primarly the "reputation" scores, among both academic peers, and among lawyers and judges. And in both cases, I think the primary factor accounting for the relatively low ranking is the same: ignorance and prejudice. Because US News surveys give evaluators only one piece of information--the school name--evaluators respond to that name, and often, it appears, nothing else. And "University of Southern California"--at least to date--just doesn't have the cache of Vanderbilt (although USC is a much stronger research university than Vanderbilt almost across the boards) or University of Minnesota (which is a stronger research university than USC at present).
But for anyone who views faculty quality as a central feature of an academic institution and is attuned to USC's faculty quality, then it's clear the "reputation" scores are too low.
One of the most interesting features of USC--it's the stuff of "legend" in the legal academy--is the school's keen eye for the very best young legal scholars. Among today's most prominent legal scholars who either started their careers at USC or were hired by USC early on in their careers are Richard Epstein (Chicago), Alan Schwartz (Yale), Robert Ellickson (Yale), Judith Resnik (Yale), Jeff Strnad (Stanford--but he's also turned down both Yale and Harvard!), Michael Moore (Illinois, but formerly tenured at Penn and Berkeley), Stephen Morse (Penn), Margaret Jane Radin (Stanford), Jennifer Arlen (NYU), and Richard Craswell (Stanford). I don't know of any law school not in the top ten who has hired so many faculty who have gone on to even greater "fame and fortune" in the legal academy. If I'm wrong, do let me know.
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