Fordham Law has placed No. 25 in a poll that ranks top U.S. law faculties in terms of scholarly excellence, posted by Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports. This rank is a two-step improvement from last year’s report, in which Leiter ranked Fordham No. 27.
To determine the rankings, Leiter combined the results of two polls. One poll, receiving over 160 votes, determined the top 20 law school faculties in terms of scholarly excellence. The other poll, drawing in over 300 votes, determined the schools ranked 21–40 in the same category. For both polls, the tendency of people to vote for their own schools was counteracted by sufficient voting and by the Condorcet method, which defeats most strategic voting. The result was that people who voted their schools No. 1 had little effect on their schools’ placements in the overall rank.
About the combined list, Leiter wrote, “This seems to be a far more plausible ‘top 40’ in terms of scholarly quality of the faculty than we’ve gotten from prior surveys, let alone from U.S. News.”