This project is inspired by the work of Brian Tamanaha, whose book “Failing Law Schools” lays out clearly the structural problems with legal academia.

These rankings were created with data from the following sources:

  1. The American Bar Association (ABA). We want to be clear that we are not endorsing the ABA; it has done more than any other organization or individual to create the law school debt crisis and to make law school unnecessarily expensive and long.
  2. Professor Matthew Sag and his research team, as well as Professors Brian Leiter and Gregory Sisk and their research teams. Each team has published a system for ranking law schools by scholarly productivity, and full citations to their articles are included in the footnotes.1 We thank all three of these professors for being nice human beings, responding to our emails, and helping the law school community understand scholarly productivity better.
  3. Law school websites, some of which were more helpful than others. If you are a law school administrator who is reading this, we kindly ask you to include the percentage of your incoming class that is in-state and out-of-state on your website in future years, which will help us rank your school as accurately and generously as possible.

We would like to thank both Law School Transparency (now a division of LSAC) and the National Association for Law Placement for producing data that helped inform the creation of these rankings, although both organizations deserve a slap in the face for their role in facilitating the law school debt crisis, along with, most of all, the ABA. If they were doing their job, this project would not exist.

1Here are the citations to both articles, along with author information:

Sag, Matthew, Inclusive Citation Rankings of U.S. Law Schools (May 16, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3929021 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3929021

Sisk, Gregory C. and Catlin, Nicole and Anderson, Alexandra and Gunderson, Lauren, Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties in 2021: Updating the Leiter Score Ranking for the Top Third (2021). 17 University of St. Thomas Law Journal 1041 (2022), U of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Legal Studies Research Paper No. 22-04, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3910536 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3910536

Matthew Sag is currently a professor at the Emory University School of Law, Gregory Sisk is a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, and Brian Leiter is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Law.