by Duncan Hollis
Today, U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) officially released its 2011 rankings of American law schools. This, in turn, led the legal blogosphere into its annual love-hate dance with the “overall” rankings–pouring over every move up or down the ladder, while simultaneously denouncing the ranking’s methodology and utility. Lest our readers feel left out, I thought I’d flag the “new” International Law rankings that accompany the overall tiering. NYU leads the pack, which actually seems quite sensible. Although NYU lost a truly tremendous figure in Thomas Franck last year, it hired José Alvarez and Ryan Goodman to join the likes of Philip Alston, David Golove, Robert Howse, Benedict Kingsbury, Mattias Kumm, Andy Lowenfeld, Linda Silberman, and Joseph Weiler (and that’s only a partial listing of NYU’s international law faculty, not to mention their global visitors, clinicians, and institute folks who also spend time working on international legal issues there).
I’ll leave to others to decide what to make of the remainder of the top 10 that’s available on the USN&WR website. What I wanted to call attention to was the “premium” access list (i.e., the list for paying customers). It details a fuller ranking of U.S. international law programs (here, for example, is where you’ll find my institution–Temple–coming in at No. 12, tied with Berkeley). There’s something different, however, about the premium list this year. In the past, USN&WR used it to list the “top 25″ international law programs. This year, the list stops at 15 (actually 17 given tie scores). What gives? Was this a calculated effort by USN&WR to change the scope and value of these specialty rankings? Was it the result of some problems with the survey data (I believe these rankings are done almost entirely based on peer evaluations) that precluded offering a longer list? Or, was it a result of some other methodological shift? I couldn’t find anything on the USN&WR site that explained the change. As a result, I’d welcome thoughts from readers on the topic. In doing so, I’ll also open up the thread to more general comments about the accuracy, utility, and value (or lack of any of the foregoing) in ranking international law programs at U.S. law schools.