The Reality of Rankings in the Legal Profession: A Student Fellow Project

As Brian Z. Tamanaha says in Failing Law Schools, the law is an “obsessively credential-focused profession.” On an individual level, credentials—and the prestige they may bring—can open doors and create opportunities. At the industry level, prestige reinforces the standing of major players. As a student fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession, I aim to further investigate prestige and its influence in the legal profession—through the medium of rankings in legal education.

Rankings—by function a marker of prestige—have proliferated throughout society, and within the legal world, they already measure the performance of law firms, law schools, scholarly legal journals, and even individual lawyers. This is true both in the United States and in jurisdictions around the world, and new rankings continue to develop. India, for example, launched its own ranking system for educational institutions in 2016, known as the National Institutional Ranking Framework (“NIRF”). Since 2018, the NIRF has released annual rankings for the top law schools in the country.

Rankings and the pursuit of prestige they represent are arguably not inherently a problem. For instance, Indian legal scholars in the twentieth century underscored the importance of generating increased prestige for the country’s then-faltering legal profession, hoping to draw talent to the field. To that end, rankings can be useful, providing concrete information to prospective entrants of a school or firm and engendering positive competition between actors.

Yet rankings have also drawn the ire of many, especially given their prominence. As scholars have noted, “[s]o important have rankings become to all higher education stakeholders that ‘[r]ankings—both national and international—have not just captured the imagination of higher education but in some ways have captured higher education itself.’” Rankings have been lambasted as creating their “own reality,” and in the international context, as perpetuating existing realities, including the dominance of Western institutions.

India’s NIRF ranking system—government run in a world of international and private rankings—exists in a unique position within this contentious conversation, and despite its more nascent entry into the world of rankings, it has already generated much scholarship on its impact, successes, and shortcomings. Little, however, has been written about the effect of the NIRF system on India’s in-flux legal education system.

As a student fellow with the Center on the Legal Profession, I aim to begin filling this gap by interrogating the role the NIRF system is having in the rapidly changing world of legal education in India. Ultimately, the NIRF rankings—through their methodology and impact—can be seen as both a product and engine of prestige in the legal education market, deserving of further consideration. In my project, I aim to ask the following questions:

• What role should a government-run rankings system play in the legal education system?
• How should prestige—often incorporated as peer reception—be taken into account, if at all?
• What consequences could the NIRF effort have on the broader legal profession in India?

This is especially important when considering the macro and micro gears at play in the legal profession, a useful framework developed by Professors David B. Wilkins, David M. Trubek, and Bryon Fong. The macro gears of the state, the market, and the bar dynamically interact with the micro gears of firms, clients, and legal education, “critical” to explaining the development of different aspects of the legal sector. The NIRF system—and the impact it has—is inextricably linked to these forces, and any analysis must take these into account.

To that end, my research will attempt to take a quantitative and qualitative approach to the NIRF rankings. By examining the available NIRF ranking data and methodology and interviewing various stakeholders in the field of legal education, I hope to better understand exactly what “reality” the NIRF system will ultimately create for India’s legal profession.

Shiv Pandya is a third year law student and student fellow with the Center on the Legal Profession. He completed his B.A. in Economics, magna cum laude, from Pomona College in 2020, and worked for two years as a supply chain consultant prior to law school.

At Harvard Law School, Shiv is the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and has been involved in Lambda, SALSA, and the Crimmigration Clinic. With this fellowship, he plans to conduct an analysis into the role of government in legal education in India, specifically by analyzing the impact of rankings on institutional behavior.