Rising Ideological Discrimination in Law School Rankings: Measuring the Conservative Penalty and Liberal Bonus with Updated 2024 Rankings Data
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In 2020, novel research was conducted to measure whether, and to what extent, the U.S. News & World Report peer rankings punish conservative law schools and reward liberal law schools. The study discovered a significant and consistent conservative penalty and liberal bonus that amounted to a difference of twenty-eight spots. The present study using updated 2024 rankings data that was released in May 2023 produces similar results and further discovered that this disparity has been rapidly rising in recent years, with an astounding 48.92-spot difference for the 2024 rankings. This increasing ideological disparity in the rankings coincides with increasing political polarization in society, strengthening the conclusion that this is the result of ideological discrimination. This Article discusses how this growing disparity in the rankings likely perpetuates a lack of ideological diversity in legal academia.This research provides a valuable framework for examining a confluence of events at this critical juncture in legal academia. This includes the banning of affirmative action admissions, the ABAs removal of the LSAT requirement, the explosion of AI technologies, the predicted law school enrollment cliff of 2025, the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, the new law school rankings methodology, and the decision of top law schools to boycott the rankings.This Article provides a strong, cumulative case for the existence of ideological discrimination in legal academia in general and, more specifically, in the law school rankings. Also documented is how the lack of ideological diversity negatively affects not only conservative professors and students, but also liberal students, and society at large.
