If you are looking for someone else to agree that Hastings is a better school than its USNWR ranking would suggest, look no further...based on my criteria, I absolutely agree with you. At the same time, it is foolish to point your finger at USNWR and call the rankings bogus. They are just as legitimate as any other, and certainly moreso than many. They publish their methodology and their data. You can easily use their data to create your own rankings based on what is important to you. Better yet, make your own ranking using whatever combination of data and other rankings that makes the most sense to you, based on what you are looking for in a law school. You're going to come up with different numbers - that doesn't mean any of the rankings are "bogus" - they are just using different criteria.
Hastings used to be ranked around 20 by USNWR, but it has definitely gone downhill in more recent years. It lost and has not been able to replace its once mighty faculty. It is also in the unfortunate position of being the 3rd best school (and not even close to #2) in an extremely competitive market. Its student quality is better than the school quality, mainly because there are lots of good students who want to go to school in the bay area and were rejected by Stanford and Boalt, schools that are exceedingly difficult to get into (like Fordham being way behind CLS and NYU in New York.) Similarly, grads of those two schools have their pick of the best jobs in the area...leaving Hastings with only 60+ percent of its students employed at graduation, a rather pitiful number. Combined with the gargantuan student to faculty ratio, the USNWR ranking makes a lot of sense. You can come up with one that is better for your individual purposes that may very well be higher, but it could be lower as well (if you weight % employed at graduation and student-faculty ratio more heavily, for example) - none of these rankings would be "bogus."