Law Prof Commentary On The U.S. News Faculty Scholarly Impact Rankings

Robert Anderson:

There are several lines of criticism. One group worriesthat releasing such a ranking will create incentives for law schools to focus too much on scholarship as opposed to teaching or cutting tuition. I don’t have much to say to this group in this post, because that’s a broader debate. Another group worries not about placing greater priority on scholarship, but about the idea of quantifying scholarly impact. Although there are real problems with quantifying scholarly impact, that too is a different debate. Scholarly impact or reputation is already quantified, it’s just quantified through the use of a somewhat haphazard survey distributed by US News.

More, here.