Having fallen out of the top 10 rankings last year for the first time in recent memory, the School of Law hopes to return to the upper echelon next Friday, when U.S. News and World Report releases its graduate and professional school rankings.
The magazine ranked the school 12th in the nation last year, prompting heightened student concern and a letter from Dean Katharine Bartlett to the community in response.
Dennis Shields, associate dean of admissions and financial aid, said the law school has made competitive hirings over the last two years, but with the goal of improving institutional quality rather than simply rising in the ranks.
"I don't know that the school has done anything dramatic," Shields said. "Dean Bartlett has stressed that we're not going to do anything simply to improve our ranking, but just to be the best law school we can.
"We've made significant faculty hires - three new members this year, three new international law faculty last year," he continued. "We've added three new legal clinics. But I wouldn't say we've done that just to improve our rankings."
Despite lower ranking, the quality of this year's applicant pool nearly matches that of last year's group. The median LSAT score of last year's pool was 162 - the same this year. Median GPA fell one one-hundredth of a point, from 3.55 to 3.54.
Shields said the numerical credentials of the students offered admission have actually improved slightly. The median LSAT of accepted students has risen from 168 to 169, and the median GPA has gone up from 3.67 to 3.73.
While the School of Law must take U.S. News' rankings seriously, Shields said, he questions aspects of the magazine's methodology, particularly the "quality assessment" category.
U.S. News used two fall 2001 surveys to assess institutional quality, which counts for 40 percent of the overall ranking. In the first survey, the magazine asked the dean and three faculty members at each law school to rate schools from "marginal" - the lowest category - to "outstanding" - the highest - on a five-point scale. This survey, which 71 percent completed, counted for 25 percent of a school's overall ranking.
The remaining 15 percent of the overall ranking came from a survey of selected lawyers and judges, which 24 and 30 percent respectively completed.
"It purports to survey for reputation a pretty broad audience, but that's just people's opinions on how academically strong Duke is," Shields said. "But just like anything, anyone can have an opinion about it, whether it's accurate or not. It's not like law schools go head to head like basketball teams."
Richard Schmalbeck, professor of law, has a different take on the reputation issue. In a study of U.S. News' law school rankings published in the Journal of Legal Education, Schmalbeck concluded that the same law schools have occupied the top sixteen slots for "quality assessment" in every U.S. News survey ever conducted
"I think it's the single best measure of a law school, because the people on the faculty are the ones who really have a systematic interaction with other faculty at other schools," Schmalbeck said.
He also noted that it is very rare for one of these schools to ever fall outside the top 18 or 19 slots overall.
"When U.S. News was first experimenting, their results seemed somewhat surprisingly different from the [quality assessment] survey," Schmalbeck said. "They revised their methodology so that their results more or less go with that survey by design."
Duke's performance in the three other U.S. News categories - selectivity, placement success and faculty resources - will have improved over last year, Schmalbeck said. Determining whether or not it cracks the top 10, however, depends on developments at peer institutions.
"Penn and Northwestern got by us, and I'm sure it was just by a whisker," he said. "There's just something mystical about the top 10. If I could, I would readjust people's sense to think about it as the top 16 because it seems clear to me that there is a real top 16. But picking a top 10 out of that is arbitrary.
"I'm pretty sure that not only in my lifetime but in yours, we'll be in the top 16," Schmalbeck added. "It's not a trend I'm worried about in the least."
Schmalbeck said several tiers exist within the top 16 law schools, with Harvard and Yale universities at the top, Stanford, Chicago and Columbia universities just below them, and Duke clustered with eight to nine other schools. Despite fluctuating rankings, the law school's graduates have found quality jobs.
"[Schools] might be a little bit better at the top three, but I think after that, they're very similar," he said. "Duke students have done very well in placement, and they've done very well this year even though it's not a good year overall for the economy. Moving from 10th to 12th is a little, trivial statistical artifact. But let's hope we're in the top 10, because you don't have to answer why you're not in the top 10 if you're in the top 10."
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