President and Dean Sean M. Scott Quoted in Washington Post

When Yale Law School made the decision late last year to divorce itself from the U.S. News and World Report rankings, President and Dean Sean Scott was eager to have California Western join the “revolution.” Yale’s decision and its reverberations in law schools across the country are detailed in an article published in the Washington Post on December 4, 2023. The article says about Dean Scott that “she opposes ranking schools altogether… which put her at an impasse with U.S. News. ‘Given that they are wedded to that model and not interested in the harm of that model, it was not worth spending my time,” Scott said.’” 

Earlier this year, in anticipation of the release of the latest rankings, Dean Scott penned an op-ed providing a firsthand account of the rankings’ pernicious effects on law school administrators' ability to act in the best interest of their students. She described how the release of the rankings will skew decision-making in donor contributions, in faculty engagement, and in current and prospective students. Dean Scott observed, “What is remarkable about each of these consequences is that they bear no relationship to any substantive changes at the law schools.” She concludes her op-ed saying:

Those of us in the legal academy, and legal employers, have imbued the U.S. News rankings with unwarranted power… U.S. News is responsible for creating the myths of rankings.  We, members of the academy and the profession, are responsible for reifying these myths and ignoring the empirical weaknesses of the rankings. I challenge us to not only expose the failed methodology of the U.S. News rankings, but also to acknowledge that we have long known of these weaknesses and have relied on the rankings nonetheless for the sake of short-term gains in prestige. We cannot control the formula that U.S. News uses, but we can control the encroachment of the rankings into areas of our profession over which they should have no influence whatsoever.   

You can read the Washington Post article here and Dean Scott's op-ed here.