Why not? Their rep ratings are already comparable with CCN, as noted, and far better than Penn's. Rep ratings, along with LSAT, constitute most of the USNews ranking weight.
The only difference between UM and CLS/NYU is a few points on the LSAT.
A Loyola LA professor put out a paper on this last year. Michigan pumping their LSAT would literally make no difference. If Michigan's median LSAT was 180 it would not raise their ranking a single point.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=937017" I begin with my conclusions. First, U.S. News’ law school “ranks” are
unreliable – that is, they are subject to significant random error.32 Second,
its “overall scores,” if read with a “±2” appended, appear to be relatively
reliable – with caveats.
My first conclusion can be illustrated by a simple example involving
a change in the numbers of U.S. News’ lowest-ranked school – which I
will call the “bottom anchor” but otherwise leave unnamed. Assume that
the reported 9-month employment rate for graduates of the bottom anchor
falls by just 1 percentage point and nothing else changes at any school in
the country. In a reliable ranking system, one would hope that such a
change would not affect the rank of any other school. After all, this is a
miniscule change in one statistic at a school that few lawyers, law
professors, or law students have heard of.
As you might expect, nothing happens to the bottom anchor’s overall
score (by definition, zero) or rank (180th). But this tiny change wreaks
havoc on the relative ranking of the top 100 law schools. Seattle and San
Francisco jump six ranks, Fordham jumps from 32nd to 27th, and Rutgers
Camden, San Diego, and Indiana Indianapolis each jump four. Houston,
Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon, by contrast, each drop three ranks. Overall,
41 of the top 100 schools change rank. Fordham’s dean gets a bonus.
Fingers are pointed and voices raised at Houston. All because of a trivial
change in the employment statistics of a single school far away in the
spreadsheet. Stranger still, if the bottom anchor’s 9-month employment
rate falls an additional 4 percentage points (that is, a total of 5 percentage
points) – and nothing else changes at any school in the country – most of
these effects disappear, but the reordering moves into the Top Ten. UC
Berkeley and Virginia both drop from 8th to 9th place. At the other schools
named above, it is as if nothing had ever happened."
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She was 13.5.
