Article on Koppen/Bench Brief feud (OK, not really, but sorta)

Back in October, the publication/website Virginia Lawyers Weekly did a piece on my friend Brian Koppen's advocacy rankings system and its application to Virginia law schools. The article mentions my criticisms of Koppen's rankings, and then gets some law students and professors to weigh in themselves.

Professor John Paul Jones at the University of Richmond School of Law apparently disagrees with my complaints. He's says that as long as Koppen "can perform simple mathematical calculations, he might as well be a journalist."

Not quite sure what he means by that. As I've said several times, I don't criticize Koppen for trying. I just think his methodology is flawed and underinclusive. Sure--anyone who can use a calculator is free to come up with his own system, and I welcome him to do so. But that doesn't mean we should blindly cite to the system's results as if they're trustworthy. I think we owe it to ourselves to take a hard look at the metrics and decide whether the resulting numbers and conclusions bear any indicia of reliability. If Tom Brokaw all of the sudden decided to put out his own rankings of U.S. law schools, with the primary factor in his system being "number of llamas or gila monsters owned by each faculty member," I don't think anyone would say, "well, he's a journalist and he can do math, so get off his back."

Professor Jones also claims that I'm confused as to competition prestige. Specifically, he says:

That some competitions are better than others begs the question of what is good about a competition. In my view, prestige helps to make a competition good, but it is only one factor among several, all of which are hard to quantify. Is the best golfer in the world a better sportsman or athlete than the best bowler or skeet shooter?

Again, I'm not sure I catch his drift. I'm not saying anything about which competitions are "good" and which ones aren't. I'm just saying that, for better or worse, certain competitions are more prestigious than others. As a result, schools typically send their best teams to the more prestigious competitions, and those competitions are, in turn, harder to win. My criticism is that Koppen gives schools more points for winning bigger competitions, even though a smaller competition may be more prestigious. And in at least one ridiculous case, you would receive almost as many points for winning the Pace National Environmental Law competition as you would for winning both the ABA NAAC and National Moot Court Competition.

I'm not asking Koppen to tell me whether the world's best golfer is a better athlete than the world's best bowler. I'm just asking him to recognize that winning the Masters is a hell of a lot more important than winning the Buick Open.

In any event, I enjoyed the story, although I wouldn't equate Koppen's rankings to a "bowl system" for law school advocacy, as the author so claims. If any bowl systems do exist, they live in the form of NITA's "Tournament of Champions" (mock trial) and the University of Houston Law Center's new "Moot Court National Championship." Sometime in the next week I'll give you my thoughts on the Houston tournament...