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WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

BAD NEWS? -The U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have not exactly gone swimmingly this year, with multiple last-minute revisions leading up to their official release today. Still, as Law.com’s Karen Sloan reports, some things never change, including Yale Law School’s stranglehold on the top spot. In fact, there was no movement among the top five schools this year. There was, however, a fair amount of shakeup among the top 20 schools, along with the introduction of a new student debt metric and the first-ever HBCU law school to crack the top 100. But the shifting rankings this year have also brought far more hand-wringing and scrutiny than previous iterations, emboldening U.S. News skeptics who say that the methodology of the rankings are flawed and that assigning numerical rankings to law schools does more harm than good. So did the rankings’ credibility take a hit among academics? Yes. Will that ultimately erode the rankings’ power over law schools? That’s… less likely. As Sloan wrote in her Ahead of the Curve column yesterday, “One person actually laughed for a good 10 seconds before answering that question.”