Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I’m Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I’ll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

In honor of the impending release of the new U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, I’m asking a few experts to weigh in on how legal education would be different if the rankings disappeared. Then I’m checking in on John Palfrey, a former Harvard Law School librarian who last week was named president of the MacArthur Foundation. Read on!