has the hysteria hit you yet? stay calm amidst the ranking craze.

[julie anne ines]

An update on the US News leak:

Trickle, trickle: U.S. News and World Report law school rankings reportedly leaked

News: The folks over at Above the Law are reporting the rankings for U.S. News and World Report’s top law schools has been leaked by a blogger. Again. Not news: The schools that have historically been up top are on top. Again.

The Critical Badger - a blogger who identifies himself as a University of Wisconsin-Madison Student – is boasting that he has received the rankings early for the third straight time and even provided a link to what appears to be a scan of the first page.

ATL tried to confirm the validity of the document, which, despite its truthiness, has an air of legitimacy to it. Despite the doubts one might have about the document, it could very well be the real thing because it looks real. U.S. News, however, declined to comment.

And while I perpetuate the mild, mass legal hysteria that has been building in blogs and law school forums since news of the leak broke Sunday by writing this post, the rankings themselves aren’t really all that exciting.

I’m not one to indulge in conspiracy theories, but I wonder if anyone has questioned if the leak, happening just days before the release of the real rankings, is a way for U.S. News to build the buzz around a product that has come under a lot of scrutiny in the past couple of years and that now has its number of detractors, like Brian Leiter of Brian Leiter’s Law School Rankings.

If you missed it, Leiter encouraged bloggers earlier this month to fight the power and refrain from blogging on the U.S. News rankings. He wrote:

The law school rankings combine “too many factors, in an inexplicable formula, and much of the underlying data isn't reliable, and some of it … isn't even relevant.  You all know this.  So don't report it.  The fact that this garbage appears in a major 'news' magazine doesn't change the fact that it is garbage.”

Ouch.

I don’t know about you, but fake rankings, real rankings, I’m just going to take them all with a grain of salt.

Comments

[The Sharkness]

http://lawschoolheadlines.com has a good section.

[Critical Badger]

Couldn't agree more.

[celebrity tube]

Yes. I have hysteria.

[viagra for women]

Very cool. One thing I might add...blogs themselves (not just the blogroll) are an important outbound uni-directional mechanism of association. I would say that a link in a blog post, at this point, is more significant and carries greater weight, than a link in a blog roll. With the proliferation of RSS, the blogroll is losing its importance in favor of the post reference-link.