![]() Legal wokeness is not confined to New Haven or the Ivy League. ![]() Along the same lines, several federal judges have said that they would no longer offer clerkships to Yale Law graduates, a potentially large blow to student professional success. That assessment decline was likely caused by Yale’s apparent intolerance of some speech inconsistent with its woke mission. All of these strike me as reasonable criteria to be used in assessing law schools, even if I might differ somewhat on the emphasis to be placed on each factor.Īt least one news account suggests that Yale’s decision may have been motivated by something other than altruism, namely the fear that it was going to lose its top ranking because of a decline in peer assessments. ![]() News’ rankings are determined by such performance-based criteria as peer assessments of law school professors, deans, lawyers, and judges (40 percent), future employment and bar-passage rates (21 percent), debt incurred (5 percent), various selectivity measures (21 percent) like LSAT or GRE admission test scores or undergraduate grade point averages, and faculty and library resources (13 percent). Magazine rankings do provide useful information. The dean of another Ivy League law school, Theodore Ruger of the University of Pennsylvania, is fighting to fire one of his most distinguished scholars, Amy Wax, for unforgivable sins such as suggesting that some persons are far more capable of performing well in law (and, by extension, in life) than others, and that perceived individual inequities are to be expected and even desirable. Dean Gerken lists on her vita her service to not one but two Barack Obama presidential campaigns. Yale and other top law schools have been strong advocates for woke nostrums ostensibly designed to create a more just society. We have attended meetings together on college rankings at places as far away as Kazakhstan. News’ leading ranking guru, Robert Morse. Also, I have long known and greatly respected U.S. I look at this as a veteran observer, as an economist who has given expert witness testimony in dozens of courtrooms, and as the founder of the college rankings for one of U.S. ![]() The law school message seems to be: “the forces of justice will prevail! That selfish magazine is not going to keep us from achieving our noble mission of turning out ‘public interest’ (as opposed to ‘private interest’) lawyers who work to remove injustice and promote the common good.” Its closest rival, Harvard, quickly joined Yale in withdrawing from the rankings, leading a large number of other highly regarded law schools to follow. News has, since it started its law school rankings, always ranked Yale the top school in the country. Yale’s move is particularly significant because U.S. I would note, however, that “for-profit” capitalism has provided a large portion of Yale’s annual income. She added that the rankings “deincentivize programs that support public-interest careers,” namely altruistic lawyers who want to serve the public good by working for government or other worthy non-profit organizations, instead of those selfish and unsavory law firms which enhance corporate greed. News is a “for-profit magazine.” The horror! The unstated implication was that this magazine, whose owners selfishly pursued their own financial interest, was judging not-for-profit (and therefore morally upright) law schools. Not ten words into the press release, Dean Heather Gerken noted that U.S. Regarding rankings, as a Yale Law School graduate and friend of mine put it, Yale started things off in “A very Yale-like way” by announcing it was not going to participate in the U.S. In short, they advocate providing both students and law schools with less information useful to determine who is fit to practice law in the United States. News & World Report rankings, while the ABA gave notice that it will likely stop requiring the law schools it accredits to require standardized test scores for admissions. In November, many of the nation’s top fourteen law schools announced that they would not participate in the annual U.S. I always thought that William Shakespeare was a bit too harsh when, in Henry VI, Part 2, he said “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” Given the antics of our nation’s leading law schools and the American Bar Association (ABA), however, perhaps Shakespeare was onto something when he penned those words over four centuries ago.
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