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U.S. News & World Report is adding as many as five new categories to its suite of law school specialty rankings this year, an expansion that's getting a cold reception from legal academics.

Many law professors at this month's Association of American Law School's annual meeting in Washington questioned whether potential law students even care about the scholarly impact of law faculties, one of the planned new rankings.

Other changes to the publication's rankings ask academics to evaluate other law schools' programs in constitutional law, criminal law, contracts and corporate law.

Part of the concern is about U.S. News' methodology for the new rankings and whether academics have enough information to accurately rate those additional programs.

"Word that the U.S. News ranking will start a specialty ranking in my field, criminal law, makes me realize that I have no clue how I would rank schools in my specialty," wrote University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor Orin Kerr on Twitter, noting that every law school teaches criminal law and that his awareness of programs is based largely on the presence of top scholars in the field rather than quality of teaching.

The law school rankings are a perennial cause for hand-wringing among the academy, but they surfaced as a focal point of this year's AALS meeting because of concerns over the upcoming so-called scholarly impact ranking, which U.S. News unveiled plans for last year, as well as the fact that the publisher's chief data strategist, Bob Morse, spoke on two separate panels and fielded questions about the changes. Morse defended the new and existing rankings as helpful for prospective students.

"At U.S. News, we have a consumer mission," Morse said during a panel discussion with Law School Admission Council president Kellye Testy. "Our goal since the beginning of the academic ranking is to provide prospective law school students with important, useful information so they can compare one school against another."

It was during that panel that Morse revealed that the latest rankings survey, which is now out in the field, for the first time asks reviewers to rank law schools on their constitutional law, criminal law, business corporations, and contracts programs. That joins nine existing specialty rankings, including intellectual property, clinical training, and tax law. U.S. News sends the survey to four people at each law school and for the specialty rankings, respondents are asked to rate each school's programs on a scale of 1 to 5.

Morse said in an interview during the AALS meeting that while U.S. News is collecting responses in those four new areas, whether it includes specialty rankings for them when the latest rankings come out in March depends on the quality of the survey data it gets back.

But it was the upcoming scholarly impact rankings that is creating the most anxiety among the academy. Morse said he was not expecting the level of pushback to the endeavor when it was announced last February. Since then, he has received an earful from law professors with concerns not only about how the ranking will be calculated, but about its potential to influence law faculty hiring, particularly if scholarly impact scores are eventually incorporated into the overall law school ranking. That overall ranking is highly influential to prospective law students and drops have led to the ouster of more than one dean.

Unlike the existing specialty rankings, the new scholarly impact ranking won't be based on survey responses. Rather, legal publisher HeinOnline is using its database to provide U.S. News with citation counts from legal journals. The ranking will count only citations from tenure or tenure-track faculty, and U.S. News has asked each school to provide a list of faculty who meet that criteria. Morse said that the ranking will not include self-citations, that is, faculty who cite their own work in their scholarship. It will also credit each author listed on co-authored articles, he said. The methodology for the ranking has not been finalized, and it may not come out at the same time as the overall law school rankings in March. Morse said only that U.S. News aims to release it in 2020.

When Morse was questioned about the purpose of such a ranking, he said that prospective law students want to attend law schools with preeminent scholars on their faculty. But numerous professors at the AALS meeting said they don't think students care nearly as much about a faculty's citation counts than the quality of their teaching. Admissions officers have a similar view. A mere 2% of admissions officers surveyed last summer by Kaplan Test Prep said prospective students should place a "high" value on the scholarly impact ranking when picking a school. Another 33% said it should have "moderate" value, while 38% said it should have "low" value. Among respondents, 10% said would-be law students should place no value on the scholarly impact ranking.

Law professors expressed a variety of specific concerns about the new ranking, including that they will exclude citations made in nonlegal journals at a time when interdisciplinary scholarship is growing and that scholarship from nontenured clinical and legal writing faculty will not be counted. Moreover, counting citations could make schools reluctant to hire junior scholars who have not as much time to publish, faculty in legal areas such as tax law that on average produce fewer citations, as well as women and minority faculty. Research shows that women and minorities on average are cited less frequently that white men.

Those concerns are somewhat muted if the scholarly impact ranking remains a separate data point. But the temptation by schools to maximize their citations through targeted hiring will amplify if scholarly impact is incorporated into the overall rankings, said numerous professors and deans at the AALS meeting. However, Morse said this month that there are no current plans to make scholarly impact part of the overall rankings.

"It creates incentives for law schools to behave badly," said Christopher Ryan Jr., a professor at Roger Williams University of Law, during a panel on scholarly impact rankings. "If rankings can be gamed, they will be."