As most of you know, this year's U.S. News rankings of law schools are now available. I'm not a big fan of those rankings. I don't think they're a particularly meaningful way of comparing law schools. They sometimes provide a laugh or two, as when a dean disparages the rankings while pointing to his or her school's rise in the rankings as a sign of successful decanal leadership. But no student should be choosing a law school based on those rankings.

However, the rankings are fun to play with from time to time, and here's one example for your amusement.

Most of the top 100 law schools in the rankings are affiliated with universities that are ranked in the U.S. News rankings of national universities. Everything else being equal, one would expect a law school's ranking to be comparable to that of its university, and many are. Yale is the top-ranked law school (an obvious mistake in this Harvard grad's opinion); its university ranking is number 3. But that's not always the case; many of the law school rankings are significantly different from the rankings of their universities.

I computed a comparison score for each of the top 100 law schools by subtracting its ranking  from the ranking of its university on the U.S. News list of national universities. (Some of the top law schools aren't affiliated with a U.S. News "national university," so they don't get to play.) The higher the number in a positive direction, the better the law school did in comparison to its university. The lower the number, the worse the law school did in comparison to its university. (U.S. News only provides national university rankings down to number 201, so I used 201 for any university below that in the list, with a plus in the comparison score to indicate that the difference is actually greater than that.)

These comparison scores might actually have greater validity than the rankings themselves, because they net out some of the factors, such as geographical differences and name recognition, that bias the underlying rankings. A university and its law school share the same name and they're in the same location.

Here are the ten law schools with the highest comparison rankings (those which are outperforming their university the most):

Georgia State 145+
Nevada-Las Vegas 134+
Houston 130
New Mexico 118
Arizona State 103
George Mason 96
Utah 87
Hawaii 86
Arizona 79
West Virginia 74

Here are the ten law schools with the lowest comparison ranking:

Northeastern -45
Syracuse -29
Yeshiva (Cardozo) -27
Penn State -23
Case Western Reserve -21
Wake Forest -20
Pittsburgh -16
Miami -15
Michigan State -9
Notre Dame -6

(The comparison numbers tend more to the positive because there are so many national universities without law schools.)

Here's a full listing of the comparison scores if you want to look up your school.

As I said, the U.S. News rankings don't mean much, so these comparisons probably don't mean much. I will leave it to others to figure out why these particular schools are so different from their universities. In the interest of full disclosure, the comparison score of Nebraska, where I teach, is 43.