You gotta give U.S. News & World Report credit. When a number of the country’s most prestigious law schools recently decided to stop providing data for the Report’s annual rankings, the publication didn’t miss a beat.
On Monday the company’s CEO, Eric Gertler, announced that in 2023 its law-school rankings would begin with the institution ranked #11. Rankings 1 through 10 will no longer be used.
According to Gertler, “we’ve come to realize that schools like Yale, Stanford, and Chicago will always be the top law schools in the nation, regardless of whether we rank them or not. They don’t need us. ‘The elite will forever be the elite’, so sayeth The Lord, who graduated from the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, by the way.
“So, here’s the deal: we’re going to kick things off in 2023 with the law school ranked #11, and work our way down from there. Our annual law-school report will be officially titled “THE BEST OF THE REST.”
The announcement was greeted with enthusiasm at Cornell Law School, which finished #12 in the 2022 rankings. As Jens David Olin, the school’s dean, observed: “Let’s face it, we just don’t have the brainpower in upstate New York to compete with places like Yale. The faculty we attract are primarily committed to skiing, not scholarship — we’re very similar to Dartmouth and SUNY Potsdam in that regard. But now we have a fighting chance to be #11 in the Best of the Rest. I am SO pumped! Who cares that we’ll be going up against law schools that operate out of food trucks on the interstate? We’re going to crush those mofos!”
Leave it to U.S. News and World Report to come up with a strategy that King Solomon — and Yale Law School — would approve of.