Against Law Blog Snarkiness

Last year, my law school’s reputation score among its peers on the U.S. News survey plunged. Looking at other changes in the scholarly reputation score’s over the years across all law schools, my school’s dean found that a .3 change in a school’s score over one year happened only about once out of 1,000 chances. What caused the change in our school’s rankings? We suspected that it was the fact that U.S. News inexplicably decided to change how we were listed on the evaluation forms sent out to law professors. Instead of being listed as “Loyola Law School Los Angeles” as we have always been known, U.S. News decided to call us “Loyola Marymount University.” As my dean wrote at the time, “While we are part of Loyola Marymount University, and proud of it, we have been known as Loyola Law School for 80 years. That name has been used in all our branding efforts.” Branding for us is especially tricky because there are law schools with “Loyola” in the name in Chicago and New Orleans as well.
Brian Leiter strongly supported our efforts to get the name changed back to “Loyola Law School.” U.S. News relented (though they still list us, inexplicably, on the rankings distributed to the public as “Loyola Marymount University”), and wouldn’t you know it? We just shot up .3 in the scholarly reputation scores, back to where we were before U.S. News made the change. So in three years, the school’s overall ranking went from 63 to 71 to 56. (The school also came in this year as number 9 nationally in tax law, and number 8 in diversity). Brian Leiter asks: “If such apparently trivial alterations can affect results so significantly, how much confidence should one have in the reputational results?”
I bring this up because some of the legal blogosphere can be very harsh when these kinds of issues come up. Above the Law, for example, dismissed my Dean’s legitimate complaint about U.S. News and the drop in our rankings as “the story that Dean Gold is going with.” Similarly, my school recently made a change in its GPA computation, applied retroactively, because our system was disadvantaging our students in the job market (we had a very low curve, and some employers, such as some government agencies, for example, will not look at our students if they have a GPA under 3.0). Above the Law excoriated the school for making this change. In contrast, the Los Angeles Times, in a much more balanced article, explained how the faculty wrestled with difficult issues and concluded, rightly or not, that this change was in the best interest of our students.
I think it is unfortunate that some law blogs now look for the worst in law schools, law firms, and others, to make things seem more sensational and scandalous. I like law gossip as much as the next person, but it doesn’t have to be mean-spirited. Most lawyers and law schools are acting in good faith, and doing the best they can. But that is hard to say with a straight face in an era of unbridled snarkiness.

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