Via Brian Leiter comes terrific news about this new faculty study by Gregory Sisk and co-authors of the law school faculty quality.  In the last study, done a few years ago, the new UC Irvine School of Law ranked 7th nationally. But that survey depended upon some adjustments given the small size of the new faculty and the plans to grow it.  Under the new study, there were no special adjustments, and UCI Law came in sixth.  From the study:

Representing about one-third of accredited law schools, 69 law faculties are ranked in this 2015 update of the Scholarly Impact Scores. The law faculties at Yale University, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, New York University, and Stanford University continue to be the top 5 ranked for scholarly impact. Since 2012, New York University has moved into the fourth position. California-Irvine has risen one position to #6, followed by Columbia at #7. Duke has risen three positions since 2012 to #8. Vanderbilt and California-Berkeley are tied for #9, which is a one position rise for California-Berkeley…

Within the top 10 for Scholarly Impact (at #6), the University of California-Irvine shows the greatest incongruity with the 2016 U.S. News ranking (at #30). Although, as a new law school, California-Irvine entered into the U.S. News ranking at the highest initial point ever, we should anticipate that it will continue moving up the ranks….

*Following the same approach as Professor Leiter, “[s]chools are rank-ordered by their weighted score, which is the mean X 2 plus the median (since mean is more probative of overall impact than median, it gets more weight in the final score).”59 In the past, because it had not yet finished hiring its tenured faculty and had a dean with exceptionally high citations, a mathematical adjustment was made to the mean for California-Irvine to predict the likely eventual position.60 For 2015, now having a full contingent of tenured faculty, California-Irvine’s Scholarly Impact Score has been calculated consistently with that for all other law schools.

I am so proud of our new law school and my colleagues and friends at UCI Law.