An interesting spectacle of law school rankings is that law schools simultaneously claim that the rankings are of the utmost importance (as evidenced by their extraordinary attempts to boost their rankings each year, including by dubious means, if necessary), while striving to convince applicants and students that the rankings have no importance whatsoever (especially when told by low-ranked schools in an attempt to divert our attention from their law rank).

Low-ranked law schools try very hard indeed to ignore the rankings, and to promote intangibles such as quality of student life, student happiness, the greenness of the campus, the library’s extensive law film collection, or free pizza each Friday. Instead of trying to improve the actual quality of the legal education they offer, they instead highlight shiny trinkets that will attract shallow students and conceal the law school’s very real deficiencies. The future for students at such a happy, pizza-filled, and entertaining law school is likely to be happy, pizza-filled, and entertaining, leading to a brief, unfulfilling, and debt-ridden career.

Sadly, such strategies work. Highlighting these intangibles fills low-ranked schools with students each and every year, few of whom can realistically look forward to a solid legal career. Cheekier law schools go further and boast of their “specialty programs” in such fields as environmental law or intellectual property law. These programs are fluff: all too often, it means that the school offers a handful of additional courses in the specialty area, which in turn are usually a pet subject of one or two (very) expensive professors.

It might be worthwhile to look at how a top-ranked law school would develop such a specialty area, and then to consider how different the reality is for a low-ranked program. In a top law school, the faculty will be extensive, with perhaps 2-3 nationally regarded experts in a certain field. Most faculty teach a course they have to teach (the first-year course) and perhaps one they like to teach (often a seminar tied with a research interest). In this way, it’s really a two-fer, as the professor gets to spend time in a low-demand seminar with a handful of students, sometimes hand-picked, who can further their specific research needs. Back to the school: the faculty can decide to focus their efforts on hiring one or two additional experts in that field, and within a few years there resides a half-dozen experts in a sub-field, with a broad array of specialty seminars and a critical mass of genuine expertise, all of which has fallen into place in a natural, mutually reinforcing manner. Having a small cadre of nationally known experts is essential. Once this happens, all roads start leading to Rome or, in this case, to these faculty-within-a-faculty. They gain the ability to poach other national experts and rising stars. Their collective expertise gains greater recognition, which leads to more expertise, which leads to more recognition, which….

Notably, most top-law schools already have one or two areas that qualify as specialty areas—but they don’t treat them in the same way as would a low-ranked law school, partly for reasons of professional jealousy and partly because they don’t have to. The specialty area feeds the general reputation, and vice versa, and the national reputation of the law school attracts students without having to resort to publicizing specialty areas in a manner that exaggerates the benefit of such centers, and deceives students into thinking that if they intend to be a lawyer in such-and-such a field, that they must attend a school with a specialty center or program in that field. This doesn’t work in a low-ranked law school, so what is “sold” is mostly false. At a low-ranked school, a specialty center is a fairly recent development, something consciously set up to attract students rather than being a natural point at which groups of like-minded experts have sought to congregate. It’s possible there can be one or two true experts in a field, and a handful of students who break into that field against all odds (often because of their prior backgrounds), but that’s fighting against the reputational stream, not flowing with it. More to the point, do you even want to “flow” with the water, or do you want to ride the wave of a top law school’s reputation. It is that reputation that will propel you into a real law position.