The new U.S. News & World Report rankings, as well as Brian Leiter's, have been released. Chesslaw* has compiled a variety of sources on the continuing controversy surrounding the ranking of law schools.

Few bloggers have commented on the rankings, except to announce them and give them the usual perfunctory brush-off (the funniest yet - Prof. Volokh failing to mention he was an evaluator for the Leiter rankings. It makes me wonder if he even realizes it). I myself get quite a few questions on rankings in my inbox, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I think it's fair to say that most of us -- students and faculty alike -- realize that rankings are important to future law students when deciding where to attend, especially when they have little actual knowledge of what a school is like, but otherwise have little value merely as lists. What value they do hold is in the individual data. It takes a lot of analysis to figure out what kind of role this sort of data should play in your own decisions.

In order to begin making your own analysis, you need to begin to think seriously about what aspects of your legal education will be most important to you. If you really only care about your earning potential, you'll need to look at job placement numbers and starting salaries (which of course, really are functions of the other indexes). If you care only about one or two specialty areas of law, the focus should be on the quality of the curriculum and faculty in those areas, not on data like volumes in the library. If you are committed to living and working in a certain regional area, you must go to school in that area, or find out which law schools are targeted by recruiters from that region. In short, actual rankings are worth little, but a great deal of the work of collating the data pertinent to your evaluation is already completed for you.

Unfortunately, a lot of data that is essential to your evaluation just can't be compiled into a single number (for example, the loan repayment program and the requirements necessary to receive grants). You'll never be able to tell by numbers and information what kind of atmosphere a school has. Campus visits are in order. (But don't get sucked in by a good time -- I think they're best for eliminating bad choices, not selecting the right school.) A school website will never reveal how much bureaucracy the administration lumbers under. A list of campus groups isn't going to tell you which ones are actually active and fun. Find out from real students -- not the hand-picked administration toadies -- what the school is like. Roam around campus, find some students who aren't in a terrible hurry and just ask. You'd be surprised at the good advice you can get this way.

Selecting a law school shouldn't be about picking the best "objectively" ranked law school you get into -- it's about selecting the best law school according to your own subjective rankings. So go forth and evaluate.

* Purveyor of the Chesslaw Law Blogs page, as well as a quite a few more really great links resources. Check out this great page of books! Perhaps I need not answer a single "how to pick a law school" question ever again. Henceforth, my stock answer shall be to read all of these books.