LAW COLLEGE'S FACULTY PRODUCTIVITY PLACES MSU WITHIN FIRST TIER OF LAW SCHOOLS

EAST LANSING, MI – In a draft study recently released on the productivity of law school faculties ranked 51-188 in US News and World Report, Michigan State University College of Law placed 33rd among peer schools. This profile firmly places the College within the Tier 1 law schools in the U.S..

The “Productivity Study,” conducted and released by Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of Roger Williams University School of Law, Professor Michael Yelnosky, illustrates an inventory of law school faculties’ scholarly output in the top 50 Westlaw journals and law reviews in the nation

The objective was to create a unique dataset – an inventory of the scholarly output in top law journals of the faculties at “non-elite” law schools. That dataset provides objective information to assess the relative strength of the “non-elite” schools in one form of scholarly research. It is the basis for the ranking of “Per Capita Productivity of Articles in Top Journals, 1993-2008: Law Schools Outside the U.S. News Top 50.” For his study, Yelnosky compared the scholarly output in selected journals of all law schools that are ABA-accredited, members of the Association of American Law Schools, and which were ranked below the 50th spot in the U.S. News & World Report 2008 rankings.

Yelnosky’s study was conducted during the summer of 2008 and applied features of the methodology used by University of Texas School of Law Professor Brian Leiter in his 2000-2002 study of per capita faculty productivity.

For the full report, visit http://law.rwu.edu/facultyproductivity/#methodology.

MSU College of Law was in founded in 1891 and is a private institution of higher learning devoted exclusively to professional education in law. The Law College is one of only a few private law schools to be affiliated with a research university, enabling it to provide a comprehensive interdisciplinary legal education program. Classes offered in its state-of-the-art facilities provide students the benefits of a Big Ten campus while maintaining the small school culture. Its 2006 graduates achieved a 93 percent bar examination passage rate nationwide and the Law College’s Intellectual Property and Communications Law Program falls in the nation’s top-20 according to U.S. News & World Report. The Law College is one of the oldest continuously operating independent law colleges in the nation. For more information about the Law College, visit www.law.msu.edu.

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