More on the Macleans Rankings

The McGill student newspaper has a good commentary on the Macleans rankings, although they question not only the elements that went into those rankings but the merits of rankings themselves where there are so few law schools. 

Most of the criticism that I have read focusses on two considerations:  the ranking of faculty by Canadian citations only, and the ranking of students by Lexpert-ranked "elite" firm hiring.  Both are, I think, valid criticisms that probably speak to an unfamiliarity with Canadian legal (and Canadian legal academic) culture. 

Canadian legal scholarship, like Canadian jurisprudence, is different from the U.S. legal scholarship in that, by and large, it is not confined to national boundaries.  As to the jurisprudence, in my field decisions from the House of Lords, the High Court of Australia, or from the Supreme Court of NZ and the NZ Court of Appeal are significant and will often be cited by our own Supreme Court and provincial appellate courts.  For the same reason, many of us have published (and some of us regularly publish) in overseas journals, and to be cited in those journals is just as meaningful an indicator (and, depending on the journal, a more meaningful indicator) of the quality of one's scholarship as being cited in a Canadian journal.  Of course, this would require the ranking compilers to do something more than a QL search, but if we're serious about citations as an indicator of scholarship, then ....?

The choice of L'Expert as the reference point for the elite firm hiring criterion is just as baffling, since L'Expert's coverage does not extend to firms headquartered in some of Canada's major cities (such as Ottawa and Edmonton).  I do think that, if this criterion can be tinkered with in order to address that geographic quirk and also to accommodate other choices that first-rate students make (like government work, public service lawyering, etc.) then this in my opinion ought to be retained.  In the long term, student placement is an important indicator of the value placed by the larger legal community upon our teaching outputs. 

Unlike the McGill authors, I do not generally oppose the idea of ranking our work or our teaching outputs, and I also realize any ranking system will have a necessarily arbitrary element to it.  Macleans also is a vast improvement over that silly Canadian Lawyer ranking system.  (Three cheers to U of A grads for not responding last year!!!!)  But with the benefit of some insight into the Canadian system, it could be a lot better.

on Rankings