US News Still Trying to Wash Its Hands

Want to see Bob Morse deflect whatever gets flung his way onto the ABA and cover the complete lack of a journalistic ethos at his organization?

Here you go.

The ABA's new placement questions are lagging on what is still needed, based on a July 27 ABA memo on Reporting Placement Data on Annual Questionnaire.

1. The ABA says it will not publish school specific salary data, but instead will publish salaries by state and region not linked to the performance of any school. These state and region results are not limited to the data from any particular law school. Prospective students want to know the average salaries [ed.: a "statistician" arguing for an average as a helpful indicator where there's a sharp bimodal distribution? Uh...okay...] of the graduates from each law school as part of being able to determine the economic viability of earning a J.D. degree from that school. The ABA should have the power to get law schools to report accurate salary data on a school-by-school basis and should trust law students to be able to understand the meaning and limits of such data.

2. In terms of employment data, the ABA is currently not asking law schools to report to them whether a graduate's job is full time or part time or whether a new J.D. graduate's job requires bar passage, whether a J.D. is preferred, or whether the job is a nonprofessional one. This is vital information that prospective students and current students need to be able to make a truly realistic assessment about the job prospects of graduates at each law school....

Emphasis mine. To be fair to Bob, he's right that more detailed information is better.

But therein we have a problem. For years, U.S. News has done little more than parrot the schools' numbers and serve as an advertising platform for flawed data. And even though Bob is clearly capable of reading a questionnaire and figuring out the deficiencies from the reader's perspective, his publication spent years (and may continue to spend years) obfuscating - not clarifying - the information available to the student by reprinting and reinforcing the schools' flawed data.

If information about whether a job is legal or nonprofessional is "vital" to making a "truly realistic assessment" among law schools, why was U.S. News so willing to ignore such niceties when republishing the schools' past employment rates during the past decade?

Here, Bob has basically admitted that the data published and implicitly endorsed by U.S. News in the past was flawed and failed to give students a helpful, realistic picture of their employment chances. Is there any other way of reading this? If student [x] can't make a "truly realistic assessment" without knowing a breakdown of legal/nonlegal jobs or more precise salaries, how could student [x] have possibly found previous editions of U.S. News helpful in forming a "truly realistic assessment" of whether law school makes a good investment?

Generally, when a journalistic enterprise screws something up bigtime, it issues a formal apology.

Has Morse/US News ever apologized? If not, when can the reading public expect it? And, better question, when can we expect Morse and US News to actually undertake some journalistic pursuit of the truth of law student graduate instead of merely profiting off a rankings-drunk public by blindly relaying whatever data the ABA (truly, an unbiased party) puts out?

In other news, California has just appointed a state supreme court justice who, as far as I can tell, has *zilcho* experience practicing in California. I get that Prof. Liu gets rave reviews from students and legal insiders, but in what way does that make one more qualified to interpret a state's rules, constitution, etc., than the numerous appellate judges and other legal figures already there? I suppose it's California's choice and not mine, but I suppose from my view, it's part of a general problem where we value pedigree, name, and legal scholarship over actual worthwhile experience that might prove necessary. It's not like this is a new phenomenon, but I think it's one that continues to be detrimental to the system on the aggregate.