As the chair of George Mason's hiring committee, and therefore a presumptive U.S. News voter, over the last several weeks I've been the recipient of huge amounts of what has come to be known as "law porn"--brochures and other materials meant to inform me about the wonderful qualities of various schools.
Most of it simply goes in the garbage. But I have looked at some of it, and I've made some relevant conclusions about effective and ineffective law porn:
(1) If you're going to brag about something, make sure it's something worth bragging about.
Exhibit A is the fourth-tier law school that sent a brochure of faculty publications over the last decade. I noticed that I had personally published more than this entire faculty. This school did not rise in my estimation.
Exhibit B is the low-ranked school that sent a large placard bragging about the fact that it now has four former Supreme Court clerks on the faculty. The school gets points for originality in design. This 9 X 12 placard is beautifully designed, and, unlike the average law porn, requires no opening to read, so the information is conveyed very efficiently, and can even easily be absorbed on the way to the trash can. Unfortunately, the information that this school has four Supreme Court clerks is likely to make readers think less highly of it. First, what could be more gauche than bragging about how many former Supreme Court clerks are on your faculty? Second, Supreme Court clerks are overvalued in the academic market (though not as much as they used to be). It turns out that I happen to know, or know of, two of this school's former clerks, and they are excellent scholars. But someone less familiar with this school's faculty would be tempted to conclude that this school is hiring clerks just to be able to say it has former clerks. Finally, one of the four trumpeted faculty members is actually a "visiting professor." There is probably more to this story, but the message conveyed from the limited text of this law porn is "we're going to spend a lot of money to tell you how proud we are to have this individual on our faculty, even though we don't think highly enough of this individual to offer him/her a tenure-track position."
Exhibit C are schools, that, assumedly to make their faculty feel better, include everyone in their publication lists, including faculty who haven't published anything outside a bar journal or a new edition of their casebook in a decade, and including faculty who aren't even expected to publish, such as legal writing faculty and librarians. The achievements of the faculty the school should focus its bragging on are lost in the sea of information about the clinicians who just published an op-ed in the local newspaper. Similarly, consider a law school that trumpets its new faculty hires, most of whom are clinical and writing instructors whose backgrounds betray no prior scholarly backgrounds. I'm sure many of these folks are fine clinical and writing instructors, but I'm not going to be especially impressed that Third Tier Law School recently hired three clinicians who attended Second Tier Law Schools and then practiced at Local Law Firms I Never Heard Of while publishing nothing. It's not that there is anything wrong with such hires, as one hardly needs to have attended Harvard and worked at a major international law firms to be a great clinician (and it may actually be a disadvantage) but the implicit message of focusing on these hires in a school's law porn is that the school has nothing better to brag about. To sum up Exhibit C, is your law porn showing how great your law school is, or how egalitarian it is? If the latter, then don't waste your money.
(2) Give stuff, not brochures. I was just thinking about how I needed a new flash drive. The University of Kentucky sent me one, with its school logo, and a file with info about how great the school is. I may never read that file, but I'll keep and use the flash drive, and I'm still more likely to read that file than most law porn. Thanks, UK! If you can't give stuff, at least design the brochure so it stands out, and may actually be read, as with the 9 X 12 placard described above.
(3) Don't send alumni magazines. These are meant for alumni, and they typically focus on things alumni care about, not things that professors at other law schools care about.
(4) Don't address the brochure to "chair, faculty hiring committee" as opposed to actually finding out who the chair is, and addressing it personally. The former address gives away that the mailing is law porn, and is therefore about 200% more likely to wind up in the trash bin, unread.
(5) Don't focus on recent and upcoming endowed guest lectures. Any law school with enough money can get just about any professor to speak on just about any topic. The fact that Richard Epstein, or Akhil Amar, or Bruce Ackerman, swung by last year tells me nothing substantial about your law school. On the other hand, if a law school has a surprisingly vigorous weekly workshop program, do send a brochure about that, because it shows that your school has an ongoing, interesting intellectual climate, not limited to when the famous stars show up once a semester.
UPDATE: Many of the comments start with the premise that "law porn" is actually going to affect U.S. News rankings. The evidence is to the contrary, as the faculty reputation portion of rankings has been remarkably stable, regardless of schools' investment in propaganda. As more schools send out this material, it becomes even less likely that it will affect rankings. Nevertherless, I assume that schools that send it would at least like to create a favorable impression in the minds of recipients, regardless of U.S. News, hence my advice.
Co-Conspiratory Orin suggests in the Comments:
I think UVa Law School does it best. They send out a journal that has excerpts from scholarly articles and detailed profiles of particular faculty members. It's a very interesting read. For example, in the last issue they had profiles of Caleb Nelson and Risa Goluboff. I was familiar with Risa's work but not Caleb's; I had heard excellent things about it but I don't think I ever sat down to read one of his articles. I found the profile fascinating, and it left a very positive impression of the law school.
Some commentors also suggest that a focus on the broad accomplishments of law schools, such as how successful they are in placing graduates, their skills programs, and whatnot, should go into the reputation rankings. Sure they should, but how do you convey this information in a way that both appears objective (and thus persuasive) and also holds the interest of the intended audience sufficiently long that it gets absorbed? No one is going to read through pages of explanations of the curricular innovations underway at 100 different law schools. Relatedly, some commenters point out that what impresses professors may not impress prospective students, alumni, and practitioners, and vice versa. True, but if your audience is professors, it makes sense to send material geared to them, no?
What should a law school that actually wants to improve its U.S. News reputation rank do? The only thing I know that definitely works is to get acquired by a more prominent university (see Michigan State and Penn State law schools), and bask in the reflected glory.
Related Posts (on one page):
- A weakness in the US News Ranking System for Law Schools:
- Effective and Ineffective "Law Porn":
Umm.... Jealous, a little?
Something to keep in mind when the inevitable "alumni beg letters" come rolling in...
Similarly, I am chair of the hiring committee at my law school and I was just thinking about how I needed a briefcase full of cash.
You are awesome.
I have no idea why you would encourage someone to do anything that would actually increase the probability that you read their law p*rn, that doesn't have to do with increasing its quality.
Oh, and apparently the word p*rn spelled correctly is not allowed on Volokh. Who would of thunk.
Um. Isn't this a conflict of interest? If you are more inclined to vote UK higher because they gave you stuff, then there's a serious problem. If you're not, then why should UK (or anyone) spend extra money to give you stuff?
Well, still not really a conflict, since there's no real "interest" on the other side anyway.
You seem to be focused on the quality of each school's faculty, which is certainly important but is not all that matters in an overall assessment of the school. Does U.S. News ask you to evaluate law schools' only in these terms or does it also want you to account for quality of facilities, innovative curricula, etc.?
I would agree with Mr. Hoffman, however, in suggesting that perhaps your standards, while certainly better and more scrupulous than those employed by the creators of the PR materials from other schools, are still wide of the mark. I've said it before, and I'll say it again--law school is a trade school. The trade is one that is inherently academic, and I have nothing but the utmost appreciation for the work that tenure-track faculty do in bringing philosophical perspective to a trade that can be influenced by profit and politics. Still, with the possible exception of about half of the students at the very, very best schools, law schools seek to create practitioners. Shouldn't we be evaluating law schools on their ability to shape good practicing lawyers?
I should also note that the two are not mutually exclusive, in my humble opinion. There are plenty of unbelievable practitioners from top law schools--much more than some are willing to admit, and I like to count myself among that category. Still, shouldn't the basis of the inquiry be who makes the best lawyers?
The conflict of interest here is being a potential voter, and publishing your (less than rigorous) evaluation criteria. Whether or not your post is in jest (or just partially joking), the fact that you would treat the subject of the US News rankings so glibly ignores the fact that so many lower ranked schools depend on those rankings to attract better professors, better published professors, and substantial revenue in the form of students.
Advertising, no matter how jokingly, that your vote is influenced by the quality of the swag a school may send you, sends the message that you don't consider your position seriously.
If you were trying to accent the fact that those rankings are arbitrary and based on the whims of the voters, perhaps that goal would've been better served by publishing an article critiquing the rankings instead of making fun of schools that are already ranked so low that their only hope lies in sending you a flash drive.
Well, at least GMU is subtle about its first ever SCt clerk: http://www.law.gmu.edu/currnews/story.php?ID=431
[rest of post deleted for nastiness]
UVa Law School has both me as an alum ('81) and my kid brother Richard Hynes as a professor.
It doesn't really need anything else.
A good blog, maybe.
Also I suspect if you do studies it is more effective to mention a big name the applicant may have heard of coming to give a single lecture than it is to focus on things that might genuinely indicate scholarly quality.
It doesn't seem any weirder about the fact that products advertises how good a deal they are on TV where you would think that seeing an advertisement would suggest a product had higher overheads and was thus less of a good deal.
Well, no way for anybody at a university to judge, perhaps. I'd think, though, that partners at large law firms would be in a good position to say which schools produce the ablest, best-prepared graduates, and which produce mostly clueless flounderers. Wouldn't their properly-aggregated ratings be much more meaningful ,then, than peer evaluations of law professors' publishing records?
david, why the bombast? perhaps every school should just put out an apb on libertarian law and economics scholars, eh?
ay! but that's the rub: having to rank 200+ schools when you only have access to (or, more accurately, the initiative to gather and digest) information about 14-20 of them. shame on you!
In any case, you have provided a useful insight into how at least one US News voter makes decisions. It may not have been the insight you intended, but it's there nonetheless.
It doesn't really need anything else
Professor Hynes left William and Mary? He was one of my favorite professors. I guess I need to pay more attention to the stuff that law schools send to their alumni.
Anyway, I'd be much more impressed with a brochure describing how a law school was playing "Moneyball" by finding candidates whose credentials are undervalued by the market, e.g., top graduates of middling schools, people who have been out of law school for years, etc.
I work for law professors, 11 of them (including a few US News ranking voters). Half the mail they get is law porn. None of them read it. All of them despise it. It is a huge waste of their time (and mine) and the sender's money, for exactly the reasons you describe. In fact, I would wager that schools lose more respect (and slots in the U.S. News rankings) by sending out so much of it.
Percentage of students passing the Bar exam?
Of course the prospective students (the real consumers of the rankings) would prefer to know how good a job the schools are doing at getting grads desirable jobs.
At first I tried doing a responsible job at determining the quality of faculty at various schools. But I soon determined that to do this job even semi-competently would be more than a full time job. So I guess that gets us back to bribes: and remember, when you bribe me, you get twice the bang for the buck! That's a joke, but I seriously might consider giving some extra credit to schools that just sent me one piece of law porn.
Strangely, it doesn't come through.
What comes through is a bunch of elite snobbery that other schools' bragging points aren't impressive enough for him.
I'd suggest if he's not impressed by a school's accomplishments, then he probably wasn't a target of their advertising. No school wants to hire a professor that thinks he's too good for them. That's how advertising works. In an effort to find the few candidates that are a good fit for their school, they broadcast to a wide audience. They know that 90% or more of the people receiving their brochures will not be interested in them, they're only looking for the 10% that might be interested in the hopes of finding the one or two people that they will hire.
But Bernstein seems more interested in milking freebies from schools he has no interest in and telling us how much better he is than they are.
Fourth tier schools don't usually put people on the Supreme Court, but they serve their purpose and they need good professors. It would seem Bernstein isn't one of those professors that they're looking for, for whatever reason.
And although these rankings may play a role in faculty decisions (such as where they choose to teach) and firm/judge hiring decisions, don't underestimate/ignore their potential for prospective law students. Knowing that professors are former clerks, where they are publishing, and who's speaking at the school are exactly the kinds of things that attract students, propel them towards career goals, and enrich the overall experience.
I assume you're trying to be helpful, but this list doesn't come off as helpful suggestions so much as it comes off as a "list of things to bitch about." Despite the title of the post, this is actually a very long list of ineffective methods, with the only effective one being that the school sent you a freebie that has nothing to do with whether or not they're a good school (I assume you're joking, but it hardly sounds like it.)
Honestly, you just come off as a law snob who looks down on inferior schools. I'm sure you didn't mean that, but such is the result given your tone.
And recent graduate, if you actually take the U.S. New rankings seriously, except for the fact that they're important because other people take them seriously, I'm glad to help disabuse you of that.
Frankly, the entire merit-by-volume-of-publications is truly an old world criteria long past usefulness. I suggest a temporary switch to decaf.
They're certainly not gospel, but they're not completely random either. Chicago really is a better law school than, for example, U of Arizona based on the standard that really matters to prospective law students, namely job prospects upon graduation. Law professors care about volume of publications but that has little or no significance for students.
I do have question, though. If, indeed it is true that
the problem is that there is no way for me, or anyone else, to judge how good a job law schools are doing at educating their students.
why are people filling out ballots ranking the schools? If you were asked to vote for, say, the MVP of a league playing a sport you didn't know much about would you do so?
He makes a good point. If you're really so disillusioned with the process, don't fill out your ballot. If you can get some support there, you can encourage a law pr0n free world.
Of course, once you're no longer a voter, you would lose the power that comes commensurate to it. Something tells me that you, and your fellow voters, are unlikely to relinquish that power, regardless of the irrelevancy of the rankings.
I think the outraged tone of some of these comments is pretty funny, as if I'm obligated to actually do serious research before filling out a survey I didn't ask to participate in, and especially since I've never actually received a ballot.
Hope the emendations are clear enough. The bottom line is that hard research shows that (a) everyone thinks that gifts do not affect them and that (b) everyone else is affected by gifts with (c) it is more likely than not that you are affected by gifts as well -- and think you are not.
He also makes some suggestions about things he thinks might work.
This is a blog, for crying out log, and a self-reflective post that puts Bernstein and Lieter in agreement -- come on, how many times can you count on that happening?!
I found it interesting as well, and think the flash drive trick is a neat one. Will probably be over used shortly (much like calendar mouse pads. The first was neat, the next twenty not as much so).
What he pointed out is the absurdity of having him (or his equivalent at other law schools) give a "rating" to other schools, based on WHAT?
And, to imagine that Bernstein's "vote" could be guaranteed with a free flash drive is just too funny for words.
The USNews ratings are b.s. However, while people are believing them, it's smart to "game" the system. I don't believe that people can be divided into groups of gold, silver, and bronze. HOWEVER, if I'm in a world where that is happening, I sure as the heck want to be placed in the "gold group."
Huh, law schools are hiring those "qualified in the clinical practice of medicine, psychiatry, or psychology as distinguished from onespecializing in laboratory or research techniques in theory"? In law school, I did take a course with an MD/JD who had completed a residency in psychiatry, but I don't believe he ever practiced as a physician afterwards, so I wouldn't count him as a "clinician" even if he supervised students in a law school clinic.
Is "clinician" the way law school faculty refer to those who work as lawyers rather than do other things after graduation, including teaching future lawyers? Is this use of "clinician" common. Was John Roberts a "clinician" up until the time he was called to be the lead Supreme? Did he continue to be a "clinician" after he was so elevated, or are judges never clinicians, at least while they sit on the bench?
Big Pharma has for years given doctors all sorts of stuff, ranging from notepads and cheap pens up to lavish trips, and you can be sure they don't do it out of an excess of largesse. They do it for the purpose of getting physicians to prescribe their drugs over those of their competitors, though the later may be cheaper and more effective than the former. Doctors scoff when anyone says they can be "bought" this way, but the evidence shows otherwise.
Alas, my specialty society gets more and more restrictive in what they will allow companies to give us at our annual meeting, and I can only wish they were less so in order that I might get better stuff, like some other specialists get at their meetings. (As I am typing this, I am thinking about how Tony's nephew Christopher reacted when he saw what went into the goodie bags of the celebs.) Since I am not chosing what drugs or devices to use for anyone's clinical care, I am confident that I can remain uncompromised no matter how much any company might lavish upon me.
Even lawyers who have been practising for twenty years are unfamiliar with excellent law schools. Especially if you are in a different part of the country, or go to a small law school, you will encounter people who have never even heard of your school. Thankfully, US News provides some credibility - lawyers can look up the school and see that it's actually decent.
Done playing devil's advocate - besides, the above purpose can be accomplished in many other ways (such as dividing schools into four or five categories, with no internal divisions, or an agglomeration of data).
You're being facetious, aren't you, Prof. Bernstein?
You don't actually mean to suggest that law school curriculums are not essentially interchangeable... ?
I think not, but perhaps they should be moved up to the third tier with Southwestern Law School or the University of Montana. They might even be competitive with Marquette University (#97) or University of Hawaii (#91).
No one is going to refer to Harvard as the "Whittier of the East," but pulling a high level of faculty should cause questions about a school's placement in the 4th tier.