Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

In honor of the impending release of the new U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, I'm asking a few experts to weigh in on how legal education would be different if the rankings disappeared. Then I'm checking in on John Palfrey, a former Harvard Law School librarian who last week was named president of the MacArthur Foundation. Read on!

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ

What If the U.S. News Rankings Didn't Exist?

It's law school rankings season!

Just a few hours after this newsletter hits email inboxes Monday night, U.S. News & World Report will release its closely watched law school rankings. And last week, Law.com unveiled its Go-To Law Schools, its annual report focused on Big Law hiring. (I'm biased on this one since I put it together, but there's lots of good stuff in there, so check it out here.)

If leaked versions of the U.S. News rankings prove accurate, there's not too much drama on the list this year, but the new rankings reminded me of an interesting moment at a conference I attended last April at Florida International University College of Law on the future of legal education.

Law School Transparency executive director Kyle McEntee suggested that someone with deep pockets (in this case he suggested AccessLex Institute) buy up the U.S. News rankings and shut it down. Many people in the audience chuckled at the suggestion, but McEntee wasn't kidding around. And I get why he threw the idea out there. I mean, complaining about the rankings is a hobby for many of the law deans I meet. Here's just a sampling of their objections:

➤➤The weight placed on the LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs of incoming students incentivizes schools to funnel more financial aid to high scorers at the expense of need-based aid, meaning lower performing students subsidize higher scoring—and often wealthier—classmates.

➤➤The rankings apply a one-size-fits-all formula to more than 200 law schools, which have slightly different missions and serve different populations of students.

➤➤The rankings artificially create the impression of significant differences in quality between schools, when such differences in reality are minor or nonexistent.

➤➤Prospective students rely too heavily on U.S. News' rankings, rather than taking the time to understand the differences between schools.

➤➤The rankings rely heavily on assessments by academics and practitioners who don't necessarily know that much about all the campuses they are rating, hence the rankings themselves become an echo chamber. The reputation survey also spawns “law school porn”—glossy mailers and such—the schools use to try to goose their reputation survey results.

I could go on with the gripes, but I'll stop there and cut to the chase. I reached out to some academics and pundits last week to ask what legal education would look like if the U.S. News rankings were to suddenly disappear. Some were skeptical things would change all that much, given the legal profession's obsession with prestige and hierarchy. But others said schools would be more free to pursue their individual goals. I'll let them take it away.

Here's Dan Rodriguez, former dean at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law: “In the absence of U.S. News, law schools will continue to compete hard–for students, for faculty, for accolades. The prestige race didn't begin with U.S. News and it wouldn't end with its demise. However, the fine-grained character of the competition, focusing on some matters which are only tangentially related to educational quality (such as expenditures-per-student) and others which are honestly beyond the law school's control (such as reputational surveys) would change. Schools might compete on a more eclectic set of dimensions. Maybe, for example, diversity (in students and in faculty), public interest and/or technology focus in the program, and the quality of post-graduate jobs, would become more meaningful factors. None of this is picked up currently in the rankings. If U.S. News rankings vanished, other rankings would emerge to try to take its place. The good news is that there might be a range of rankers (think here of Business Schools) and that would give law schools more flexibility and, ultimately, our students more information. All to the good!”

And Danielle Conway, dean at the University of Maine School of Law and incoming dean at Pennsylvania State University-Dickinson School of Law:“Absent the spectre of [the U.S. News ranking], I believe that legal education could flourish under a more placed-based model, allowing law schools to be more responsive to the specific opportunities and challenges facing their respective communities. Law schools could then enhance their foci on developing lawyers and leaders who would be capable and willing to serve a more diverse range of interests as well as represent myriad and diverse communities in our society.”

And here's Kyle McEntee, who prompted the question in the first place: “The U.S. News rankings play a direct role in increasing legal education costs and decreasing the commitment schools can have to access, affordability, and innovation. If U.S. News went away tomorrow, the impact would be between 'some' and 'a lot.' It depends on whether schools really want to change. Schools would certainly have more flexibility in how they allocate resources, but removing U.S. News is not a panacea. Some places we could see change include who schools admit; how they structure pricing and to whom they allocate scholarships; how and who they hire; and how they design their curriculums.”

The takeaway: Let's be real. The U.S. News rankings aren't going anywhere anytime soon. (Sorry Kyle.) But I think it's useful to think about how law schools might function differently in their absence. That might provide some inspiration for more modest initiatives that improve the educational experience without necessarily torpedoing a school's ranking. I don't expect any law school to shoot itself in the foot by making changes that sink its U.S. News ranking, which would only drive down applicants.

From the Law Library to the MacArthur Foundation

Here's some cool news: The MacArthur Foundation last week named John Palfrey as its new president. Palfrey's name might sound familiar. He's currently the head of school for Phillips Academy Andover, but before that he was vice dean for library and information resources at Harvard Law School. He was also the executive director of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Societyfrom 2002 to 2008.

The MacArthur Foundation, of course, is best known for its so-called genius grants, which come with a $625,000 prize. (A few lawyers typically make the cut each year.)

“I am honored to lead the MacArthur Foundation during such a critical time, when challenges facing people and our planet can seem insurmountable, but the tools of social change are evolving to be even more powerful,” Palfrey said. “I am an optimist, who believes that creativity, rigor, and selective disruption can make outsized social impact possible.”

MacArthur board chairman Dan Huttenlocher said Palfrey has “demonstrated a commitment to rigorous thinking, disruption, and creative solutions often made possible by technology, accessibility of information, and diversity and inclusion.”

Extra Credit Reading

The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University has received a $50 million donation from the estate of Judge Allison M. Rouse, formerly of the U.S. Court of the Appeals for the D.C. circuit.

State lawmakers in North Dakota are considering raising the fee to file a civil lawsuit from $80 to $180, with the difference going to fund the state's only law school.

Will the National Association for Law Placement's recent overhaul of its law student hiring guidelines upend the upcoming on-campus recruiting season? Not likely, schools and law firms say.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]