Legal News

Why Harvard Could Overtake Yale in the U.S. News Rankings

By Dan Slater

Students walk through the Harvard Law School area on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2002. (AP/Chitose Suzuki)

Despite the lofty status that Harvard law school enjoys in the collective legal consciousness, and the case-method legacy of Christopher Columbus Langdell, it is actually Yale law that has long dominated the field, at least so far as U.S. News is concerned.

Harvard, we’re told in a recent Boston Globe feature, has often been referred to as the factory, “a boot camp of big classes and remote professors that funneled bright young minds into corporate legal work.” The Globe continues: “The school was seen as hobbled by ideological clashes, or by its unwieldy size, or simply by ossified ideas about teaching law. Its students felt estranged; its faculty was fractious, aging, and unable to agree whom to hire or how to modernize.”

But things might be changing, according to the Globe. The school’s fortunes began to shift, apparently, with a changing of the guard. Elena Kagan, a White House lawyer in the Clinton Administration who was chosen by former Harvard President Larry Summers to succeed Robert Clark as dean, has done a bang up job hiring new talent and keeping the kids happy. (In 2006, when Kagan was not picked for Summers’ job, law students threw a party that featured T-shirts saying “I [heart] Elena.” Top that Dean Koh!)

Kagan (pictured) went about beefing up Harvard’s stock of law profs with some younger, high-profile public law scholars. Among them, notes the Globe, are Cass Sunstein, whom Kagan calls the preeminent legal scholar of our time; Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush White House lawyer and leading skeptic of international law; John Manning, an administrative law expert and constitutional scholar of the “textualist” school; Adrian Vermeule, who has argued for reducing the role of the Supreme Court; Islamic scholar Noah Feldman; IP and cyberlaw expert Yochai Benkler; and environmental scholar Jody Freeman. (The Globe also notes than an offer is out to Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig.

This is all well and good, but will assembling this army of Great Minds really alter Harvard’s reputation as a corporate feeder school? What say you, LB readers?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 20, 2008 (boomark / email).