Update: After I published this post, Dean Erwin Chemerinsky sent me a gracious note pointing out some people I had missed in my counts. I've updated the post in red so it is clear what changed.
Every year, professors move from lower-ranked institutions to higher-ranked institutions. But for the lateral market to sustain itself, schools have to continue to play the game: recruit laterals, hoping they improve the school's standing before they move onto greener pastures.
One way to measure this market is to analyze the track record of a new school that built its faculty from scratch. Over the past quarter century, the American Bar Association has granted provisional accreditation to about 20 law schools. Only three of those institutions have cracked the top 100 U.S. News rankings. Last year, FIU was at #77 and Drexel was at #82. U.C. Irvine, founded in 2007, is the outlier. The new state school has hovered between #20 and #40 over the past decade. A lot of the credit should go to Founding Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. But even after Chemerinsky departed for Berkeley in 2017, the rankings have stayed fairly consistent.
