When it comes to producing highly influential future federal judges, the University of Michigan Law School is tops, according to a new analysis by legal research and analytics firm Ravel Law.
Michigan’s alumni federal judges on average authored more opinions and saw their opinions cited more often than alumni judges from any other law school, according to Ravel’s analysis.
“It is a bit of a surprise” said Ravel co-founder Daniel Lewis of Michigan’s first-place finish. “I think the stereotype going into this kind of report is that Harvard, Yale and Stanford are the schools churning out a lot of clerks and creating folks who go into the judicial system as judges. We treated it as an experiment and we didn’t know what we’re going to find.”
Harvard and Yale are far and away the biggest feeders into the federal judiciary. But sheer numbers of alumni judges don’t tell the whole story, Lewis said. “It’s quality over quantity when it comes to the impact of those judges,” he said of Ravel’s study.
Ravel examined the number of opinions written by federal judges over the past 80 years as well as the number of times their opinions were cited, then ranked the law schools according to the average score of their graduates on the bench. This approach was based on the Hirsch Index—a method developed to gauge the influence of science researchers.
The study looked only at judges who had authored 10 or more opinions, and schools had to have at least 10 alumni on the bench in order to be included in the analysis.
Michigan’s alumni judges came in with an average influence score of 41.43, followed by the University of Chicago Law School at 35.47; Yale Law School at 29.29; and Harvard Law School at 27.87. Five law schools outside U.S. News & World Report’s top 10 made Ravel’s top 10 list for judicial influence: George Washington University Law School; University of Notre Dame Law School; University of Alabama School of Law; University of South Carolina School of Law; and Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.