Brett Kavanaugh Takes A Shot At The U.S. News Law School Rankings -- Maybe Now You'll Forget About That Other Kavanaugh Story

(Photo by Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
Earlier this week, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh made an appearance at Notre Dame Law School. Maybe Kavanaugh wanted his Google News search to return more than stories about the "outrage"-inducing new documentary, "Justice," that details the multiple sexual assault allegations against him as well as the shoddy FBI investigation into said allegations.
But more than a diversion from the powerful new documentary, the talk -- which largely focused on the sparkle magic friendship the justices on the Court feel towards one another -- was also a handy bit of PR. Kavanaugh may just enjoy waxing poetic about the congeniality on the Court, as reported below:
"You become, through those lunches, friends, and my experience with the court in my four-and-a-half years is there are great relations among all nine justices -- both personally and professionally," Justice Kavanaugh said. "We only get tough cases, and we disagree on some of those -- I think that's more nuanced than is sometimes portrayed -- but we work well together, and we get along well together."
But it is also a sly retort to recent media coverage describing how congeniality has broken down on the Court, and divisiveness has become the order of the day.
Besides talking up the awesome friendship the justices share, Kavanaugh also weighed in on a major current issue in legal academia -- the U.S. News rankings. He said:
"I think those ratings are very problematic," Justice Kavanaugh said. "I think they're based on things that are very amorphous, very subjective -- factors that don't correlate well with the education that you're actually receiving."
"I find them highly problematic," he added. "The reputation score, that's kind of a joke, isn't it? Does that really show whether a student is getting a better education at School A or School B?"
So Kavanaugh doesn't put much stock in the reputation scores for law schools. That must mean the clerks he hires are from a wide variety of law schools, right? Oh... no.
Anyway, when it comes to rankings, count Kavanaugh on the same side as Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford Law, Georgetown, Columbia Law, UCLA, UC Davis, Michigan Law, Northwestern, Duke, UC Irvine... and the list of law schools bailing on the ranking is only growing.
See, that's gotta be enough to stop people speculating about the movie Justice, right Brett? If only the *new* tips about Kavanaugh's behavior (and the FBI investigation into the same) would stop coming in.


Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon