Joshua Moskovitz, 2L
Executive Editor
Only 30 years after graduating its first class, Cardozo is one of the top 50 best law schools in the country. In the 2010 U.S. News and World Report rankings, released last week, Cardozo jumped six places to secure the 49th spot. Cardozo received a score of 54 points on U.S. News’s controversial scoring system. Scores are scaled on a 100-point system relative to the highest-scoring school, which is perennially Yale Law School.
On its website, U.S. News says the rankings are based on “expert opinions about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research, and students.” For law schools, U.S. News describes in detail a host of categories and the corresponding weight it applies to that category. The most heavily weighted categories include “peer assessment” and “assessment score by lawyers/judges,” which account for, respectively, 25 and 15 percent of a school’s overall score.
New in this year’s methodology for calculating a school’s overall ranking was the inclusion of admissions data for part-time entering students in calculating the school’s acceptance rates, median LSAT scores, and median undergraduate GPAs. U.S. News also added rankings for 87 part-time J.D. programs in which Cardozo tied for the 18th spot.
Cardozo also ranked in several specialty programs: its dispute resolution program came in at 7th and its intellectual property program landed the 8th spot.
U.S. News also compiles scores reflecting school diversity. Cardozo received a diversity index score of 0.35. According to U.S. News’s website, the diversity index indicates “where students are most likely to encounter classmates from different racial or ethnic groups.” The index is based on a scale of 0 to 1.0; actual scores ranged from the least diverse at 0.06 (University of South Dakota) to the most diverse at 0.65 (Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University). Scores are distilled from the total proportion of minority students, excluding international students, and the mix of racial and ethnic groups on campus. In other words, a school with a large proportion of students from one ethnic group, even if it is a minority group, receives a low diversity score.
This is the first time U.S. News has ranked Cardozo in the top 50 best law schools. Cardozo is one of the youngest schools considered for the U.S. News law school rankings.