Best JD Prep? A Liberal Arts Degree

The Best Law Reviews

This week, Above the Law released its annual law school rankings, which are premised on job placement, starting salaries, and student debt of new grads. While outcomes are critical, academic excellence matters too. And one barometer for measuring quality is a school’s law review.
There are three main sources for law review rankings. As you’d expect, U.S. News and Google Scholar are two of them. But you’ll find a third at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law.
Here’s how their ranking system works: Washington and Lee’s annual rankings are based on citations. “We use Westlaw to search for citations to each journal in cases and in other journals,” explains Stephanie Miller, the Electronic Services Librarian at the school.
According to National Jurist, Washington and Lee’s Law Journal Ranking Project applies a hard-data approach that “offers a combined-score ranking, which is a composite of each journal’s impact-factor and total cites count. The impact factor shows the average number of annual citations to articles in each journal.”
By using this data, Miller notes that “scholar(s) can evaluate journals in their subject area, in their country, with their preference of editing or format, and find a journal that will give their work the highest visibility and likelihood of citation.” Just as important, these citations reflect the quality of scholarship in particular school journals.
So which periodical hit #1? The Stanford Law Review tops the list, followed by law reviews at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Surprises? UCLA certainly punches above its weight. Despite ranking #16 overall in U.S. News, the UCLA Law Review comes in at #7 in Washington and Lee’s list. The University of Minnesota and Fordham University, which rank #20 and #36 respectively in U.S. News, produce law reviews that rank #11 and #14. And Washington and Lee doesn’t play favorites, as its own review rates #44.
Here are the top 20 law reviews according to their methodology:
1.  Stanford Law Review: 100.0
2.  Harvard Law Review: 97.9
3.  Columbia Law Review: 95.7
4.  The Yale Law Journal: 91.8
5.  University of Pennsylvania Law Review: 83.9
6.  The Georgetown Law Journal: 82.9
7.  UCLA Law Review: 81.9
8.  Michigan Law Review: 76.3
9.  California Law Review: 75.1
10.  Virginia Law Review: 73.8
11.  Minnesota Law Review: 72.3
11.  Texas Law Review: 72.3
13.  New York University Law Review: 68.3
14.  Fordham Law Review: 68.2
15.  Cornell Law Review: 65.8
16.  Notre Dame Law Review: 65.4
17.  Northwestern University Law Review: 62.9
18.  Iowa Law Review: 60.6
19.  Duke Law Journal: 59.3
20.  Vanderbilt Law Review: 59.2
As you’d expect, these results deviate slightly from the other two law review rankings. U.S. News lists the Yale Law Review at #1, followed by Stanford and Harvard, which tie for second place. And Google Scholar gives the honors to the Columbia Law Review, with the law reviews at Harvard and Stanford coming in at #2 and #3.
For the complete ranking, click on the link below.
Source: National Jurist