GMU Law

My colleagues in GMUs school of law can be justly proud of how quickly their program has risen in the rankings.  TaxProfBlog excerpts from a National Review article:

Mason vaulted from 71st place in 1995 to 41st in 2005 -- an impressive achievement given that these rankings tend to remain static from year to year...

To use a baseball metaphor, Manne was a scout who specialized in the minor leagues. Whereas his competitors were obsessed with signing big-name free agents in hot fields such as feminist legal theory, Manne quietly assembled a team of undervalued unknowns. "If the market discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good opportunities for hiring conservatives," says Polsby. This is exactly the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy law-and-economics scholar to make... "Have you read Moneyball?" asks Todd Zywicki, another one of Mason's bright young profs, in reference to the best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. "We're the Oakland A's of the law-school world."

Especially interesting is that GMU is probably undervalued relative to its academic achievement.

[GMU] probably would do even better but for the particular ways U.S. News calculates worth: Forty percent of a school's ranking is based on reputation, as determined by judges and lawyers (15 percent) and law professors (25 percent). "If we had Dartmouth or Princeton's name," says Polsby, picking two well-regarded schools that don't have law programs, "we'd be a top-20 school overnight." ...

Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Texas, has created several ranking systems that rely entirely on objective criteria. It might be said, for instance, that a school is only as good as its students. The 75th-percentile LSAT score of Mason's entering class in the fall of 2005 was 166 -- enough to tie it for 22nd best (with seven other schools). It might also be said that a school is only as good as its professors. To measure this, Leiter has created a "scholarly impact" rating based on faculty per capita citations in scholarly journals and books. On this scale, Mason ties for 23rd (with four other schools). Then there's the Social Science Research Network, which counts the number of times faculty papers are downloaded from the Internet; over the last twelve months, Mason professors rank eleventh....