The September 24th edition of Maclean's magazine is going to have a feature story in which Canadian law schools are ranked according to a methodology that is "simple, transparent and relies entirely on public data."
Professor Brian Leiter, well known for his ranking of US law schools, was retained by Maclean's to assist in the design of the ranking. The magazine's website has a brief discussion of the methodology, but the basic story is that 50% of the ranking is given to faculty research quality (as measured by citations of work in Canadian law reviews) and 50% of the ranking is based on student quality. The student quality measure, in turn, is an amalgam of three measures: (i) "elite firm hiring"; (ii) "national reach" (15%); and (iii) "Supreme Court hiring" (10%). The methodology seems reasonably sensible, albeit somewhat arbitrary (as any method of ranking law schools is apt to be).
The key requirements of any such ranking of law schools to my mind are two-fold. The first surrounds whether the ranking is attempting conceptually to capture the most important and relevant measures of law school performance (in all its facets). It would not be surprising if reasonable people had different views as to what the "most important and relevant measures of law school performance" are, and I don't purport to know what they ought necessarily to be, though faculty quality and the success of graduates do appear to be quite reasonable selections at a conceptual level. The second key requirement is whether, as the conceptual measures are operationalized, they are in fact capturing what they are purporting to capture. I will have more to say about how well the methodology adopted for this ranking satisfies this second requirement in a post soon to follow this one (this evening or tomorrow morning).
The magazine has not provided on its website information on the overall rankings, but has provided information on each of four components going into the overall ranking. Of course, some rudimentary Excel skills can rapidly convert these sub-indices into an overall ranking given the reported weights.
Without further ado, here are the results for Canada's common law schools. (Caveat emptor: these are my own hasty calculations.)
UPDATE: I've been told by a reliable source that while these calculations are close, they are not spot on, because the overall ranking uses z-scores for each of the components rather than a weighted average of the ordinal rankings in each.
UPDATE 2: Here are the actually reported rankings:
