Pay attention to the New York bar passage rates in the fascinating new 2008 US News & World Report ranking system. If you rank the law schools that send the largest percentage of each class to the New York bar, which currently has a 74% pass rate, here's how the law schools line up:

1. University of Michigan....96.5% of its most recent graduates who took the New York State bar exam passed it.

1. University of Virginia (tied)....96.5%.

2. University of Pennsylvania Law School....95.5%.

3. Harvard....95.3%.

4. Cornell....94.3%.

5. Yale....94.2%.

6. Duke....94%.

7. NYU....93.4%.

8. Georgetown....92.5%.

9. Columbia....90.6%.

10. St. John's University....88.8%.

11. George Washington....87.5%.

12. Fordham....87%.

13. Cardozo....84.4%.

14. Brooklyn Law School....84%.

15. Albany Law School....77.9%.

16. University at Buffalo-SUNY....77.1%.

The average pass rate for the New York State bar is 74%. The following schools are below this average.

17. New York Law School....73.1%.

18. Pace....71.7%.

19. Hofstra....69.9%.

20. Syracuse....68.7%.

21. Howard....68.3%.

22. Touro....65.9%.

23. CUNY-Queens....61.5%.

I think that these bar passage rates are valuable measures of institutional competence in preparing law students for the rigors of one of America's toughest and most desired bar exam admission results. While elite law schools generally disdain any explicit effort to prepare their students for a bar exam, they all want their graduates to have extremely high bar passage rates. You have every right to consider a school's bar passage rate in the jurisdiction of your interest, as you think about where you want to study law.

The University of Michigan Law School and the University of Virginia School of Law deserve great credit for being at the top of this list. Some schools here, like Columbia, Fordham and Cardozo, should be doing better.

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