Legal Commentary

So the US News surveys are out (I managed to escape the task of filling it out--my reign as most-recently-tenured at my school lasted all of one year). Like the Rose Bowl, the US News rankings remain the "Grand[parent] Of Them All." Meanwhile, other surveys and rankings proliferate like so many Motor City Bowls--albeit without corporate sponsorship, but subject to just as much criticism. So, in the past two months alone, we have had Leiter's Scholarly Impact Study, Sisk's Expansion of the Scholarly Impact Study, Leiter's Voter Survey of the Top 40, Best Values, Best Law Schools for Hispanics, and the various Princeton rankings (including Most Diverse Faculty).

I wonder to what extent the US News has become the meta survey, with these other, smaller surveys influencing (to some degree or other) what US News voters think and say about particular schools based on how those schools did in the smaller surveys.