| Topic Name: |
Which law school is #1 ? |
| Message Name: |
What is the point of all this? |
| Date Posted: |
02/19/2000 |
| In Reply To: |
>>US News puts NYU ahead of Columbia,
>>Chicago and Michigan, which I have trouble
>>believing.
Why is that hard to believe? I think it stands to reason considering the obvious East Coast, in general, and NYC, in particular, =bias= that's evident in everything from rankings to posts on this board. The fact that someone posted a message in this thread calling everyone outside of NYC "hicks" is quite telling. He's not alone from what I've read here.
BTW, exactly where does USN&WR have its =main= offices? Gee, wouldn't be NYC and DC, would it? For that matter, where are the offices of Vault.com? Get the drift? |
| Message: |
Any ranking is going to be subjective. Merely combining several subjective rankings into one super-ranking does not make it any more objective.
People can't even agree on which sports teams are the best. The relative worth of law schools is much more difficult to define and distill into a single numerical ranking.
On the other hand, it is clear to most people that law schools, like sports teams, can be broadly separated into distinct groups of quality.
Yale and Columbia are two examples of schools that are at the very top of the pecking order, just as the Lakers and the Trailblazers are at the top of the basketball pecking order (notice that the entire NBA can probably be analogized to the "Top 25" law schools, and that the CBA might be analogized to "second tier" law schools. Correspondence law schools are pickup games among aging baby boomers)
For both basketball teams and law schools, the stratification into "tiers" obscures the fact that the lines are very fuzzy at the borders. A top CBA team might actually at times be better than the present-day Chicago Bulls, for example. And of course, individual players within any given organization can be much better than those at "better" organizations.
But I'm already carrying this too far. Law school is not basketball. The point of using the basketball illustration is that while some broad generalizations about schools might be appropriate, fine line drawing is absurd. Unless there is some sort of law school playoff system . . . . But how exactly would a law school "win?"
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