Last week, Brian Leiter posted his assessment of the changes in faculty quality since 2003: Law School Faculty Quality: Who is Up and Who is Down Since 2003. Here is a taste:
The effects of these moves will be more substantial on the rankings in the specialty areas of course. For example, in the Business Law areas, the top five will remain the same, except Yale is likely to be up there now with Stanford and Chicago; Cornell and USC will be out of the top ten; and Texas will be squarely in the top ten. In Constitutional Law, Yale and Harvard will still dominate everyone else, and Chicago, Texas, and NYU will still fill out the top five, while Michigan is likely to break the top ten. In Law and Economics, Chicago, Harvard, and Yale will still dominate everyone else, Virginia may slip out of the top ten, and USC almost certainly will. In Law and Philosophy, NYU will still clearly be #1, but now with a big gap between them and the next "top 5ish" cluster–Columbia, Texas, Yale, Penn, but also now Michigan (while Cardozo will drop out of the top ten). I would also expect UCLA to be more squarely top ten (competitive with, e.g., Illinois and Berkeley), rather than borderline, as it was in 2003. In Law and the Social Sciences, Northwestern should certainly join the "top five," but otherwise there probably won’t be much change.
Most readers of this blog will know that the big moves in lawand philosophy were Jeremy Waldron from Columbia to NYU and Scott Shapiro from Cardozo to Michigan.