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Well the rankings are out and, as usual, the dips and rises make no discernible sense. In an effort to isolate the factor(s) that cause all this movement, I conducted a seven year longitudinal study of reputation and ranking. I've compared data from 1998 (the first year in which schools were ranked on a 1-5 scale) through this year (2004), and have come to some interesting conclusions:
The academic ranking of the law schools is surprisingly consistent. Over seven years, it didn't vary by more than 0.3, with an average of only 0.1. I can think of a number of possible reasons for this:
Lawyers, on the other hand, showed noticeably more variance in their rankings of a school's reputation; the average variance was 0.3, and some schools' reputations varied by as much as 0.7. Here are some possible reasons:
The most important lesson, however, is that reputation and rank are only very loosely correlated; in fact, out of the top 15 schools, there is only a small correlation between academic reputation and rank, and virtually no correlation between lawyer reputation and rank.
Most people confuse the overall ranking with the school's reputation. However, the two are only loosely related, as the graphs below indicate.
As the above graph indicates, the lower a school's rank, the more variation in it there is. Variations in rank are erratic, and not particularly related to reputation. Many schools among the top 50 have fluctuated by 20 or more places in the rankings.
Academic reputation, allegedly the single most important factor in the US News rankings, shows none of the variability that rank does. Instead, it's virtually the same, year after year. And after the top 20 places, it shows none of the steady downward trend you'd expect if it were correlative to rank. Note that the sharp declines at 37, 41, and 48 (top graph) seem to correlate with reputation, but additional declines at 49-51 do not. Moreover, the schools between 37 and 60 have risen in the rankings as often as they have declined, while the academic reputation has not varied.
Lawyer reputation, especially outside of the top 15 to 20 schools, doesn't define a downward trend at all; instead, it moves in broad horizontal bands, supporting the theory that schools fall into tiers more than into a linear relationship. In the 45-50 range, there's as much upward movement as downward. This does seem to more closely reflect the overall rankings. BUT US News says that lawyer rep is only 15% of the composite score, instead of the 25% accorded academic rank.
Finally, this really chaotic grid shows how little relationship there is between academic reputation (the better correlator above) and rank. Schools that are always in the 4th tier (brown line) and sometimes in the 4th tier (purple line) undeniably have lower reputation scores than those that are at least sometimes in the second tier (green line). But schools that are sometimes in the top 50 (black line), those that are always in the second tier (red line) and those that sometimes dip into the third tier (green line again) overlap so much as to show no pattern or trend. Note, by the way, that there are so few schools that are always in the third tier (blue line) that they're not even worth mentioning.
Sadly, not much. Ranking still controls your decision about where to enroll more than reputation does. Until you learn to distinguish the two and decide which one matters, USNews will control where you go to law school.