The biggest factors in the rankings are lawyer and peer “assessments,” in which law deans, judges, practitioners, relatively junior professors and others are asked to rate programs around the country. But how much do they really know about the schools they are rating? Lawyer and peer assessments risk being simply an echo chamber in which a given law school ranks high this year largely because of a vague sense by distant and ill-informed observers that it is a top law school. Often because it ranked well in previous years.

Source: Los Angeles Times March 19, 2019 10:07 UTC