Thomas Jefferson School of Law ranks as the number one undervalued law school according to Paul Caron of Pepperdine University School of Law, who writes for TaxProf Blog: A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network.
In Ranking Law Schools: Using Social Science Research Network (SSRN) to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006), Professors Paul Caron and Bernie Black compared the ranking of law schools in U.S. News with a prominent means of distributing legal scholarship: Social Science Research Network (SSRN) downloads of faculty scholarship. SSRN roughly measures which scholarship is read and presumably valued. TJSL tops the lists of schools that are undervalued by US News, by a factor of over 100 points, compared to SSRN ranking.
“Thomas Jefferson School of Law believes that the most important asset of any law school is its faculty,” said Dean Thomas Guernsey. “TJSL has experienced, caring and diverse faculty. Their credentials are first-rate, even world-class. Our professors have a wealth of real-world legal experience. They have structured business transactions at both the international and the domestic levels, and litigated before the World Court at The Hague, the U.S. Supreme Court, and federal and state trial and appellate courts.”
“Members of our faculty also have written leading law books that are in use by universities and practitioners in the United States and abroad,” said Dean Guernsey. “They have testified before Congress and state legislatures, have appeared as experts on national television and radio news broadcasts and have served as legal consultants to our government, the United Nations and several foreign governments. Faculty write cutting-edge legal scholarship, leading to such a prominent place on SSRN.”
Dean Guernsey added, “The value of this information is not the ranking, but the objective data it conveys about our faculty. Thomas Jefferson School of Law professors are prolific scholars as well as effective classroom instructors. Of course, Thomas Jefferson remains dedicated to its primary and traditional mission – providing a high quality legal education to students from diverse walks of life. What this report shows is that our faculty is, at the same time, passionate about research and deeply engaged in today’s scholarly and public discourse.”
