Law Students as Consumers of Rankings

Checking up on those law student blogs, I was surprised to see how aware they are of the various law school rankings there are, and how skeptical they are, at least of some.

Take a look at JD2B.com blog.

Law student Marshall Camp is providing links to a wide variety of rankings, from Leiter's various rankings, to the Vault rankings, and U.S. News' rankings. He even includes the abstract of an SSRN article from Jeffrey Evans Stake's April 2005 research paper, The Interplay Between Ranking and Criteria and Effects: Toward Responsible Rankings. The paper is very critical of rankings for all the reasons law schools have provided for years; the rankings distort the education process by stressing unimportant aspects and rewarding schools for spending time and money on those unimportant aspects.