Leiter: Don’t Post USNEWS Law School Rankings

Professor Brian Leiter has written an excellent and thought-provoking article entitled An Open Letter to Other Law Bloggers Regarding the US News Rankings in which he exhorts the legal community to refrain from posting the results of the upcoming USNEWS rankings. The controversy surrounding the annual report in which accredited law schools are ranked and broken down into one of four tiers is not new. The legal academic community has long been hostile to the specious rankings and the questionable methodology by which the ranks are determined.

This hostility is not unfounded. Whether we like it or not, there is no denying the influence the rankings have on the perceptions of law schools in the legal community. Perhaps even more unsettling is the power these ranking have over the law schools themselves. There is a race to the bottom and those who game the system to pad their rankings rise at the expense of those that do not.

Media Permitted to Photograph Return Protocol for Slain Soldiers

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon has approved media access to witness and capture the return protocol for slain soldiers returning from overseas. The prohibition on media attendance has been in place since 1991 and this represents a dramatic change in the access granted to the media. Professor Josie F. Brown has written an interesting article on this subject entitled Dover AFB Allows Media to Witness Return of Coffin of Soldier Killed in Afghanistan.

The media has been focusing on a number of recent events that suggest that the Obama administration is hedging its earlier promises of transparency and greater media access regarding warrantless wiretapping and the sealing of documents. The lifting of the media bad demonstrates however that Obama is working to honor his campaign promises.