Yesterday, I received a letter from US News & World Report.  It said, "As part of its spring 2005 report on graduate and professional schools, U.S. News & World Report is conducting a survey to identify the law schools having the top programs in intellectual law.. .. This survey is being sent to a sample of law school faculty listed in the AALS Directory of Law Teachers 2003-2004 as currently teaching a course or seminar in intellectual law.  Your participation in this survey in greatly appreciated."

For good or ill, the U.S. News rankings of law schools are looked at carefully.  So I knew instinctively that this was an important moment.

Who has the best program in intellectual law?

It's good to know that U.S. News cares about intellectual law.  Someone needs to.  I was relieved that Brian Leiter had visited Cardozo just the day before.  This signaled to me that clearly Cardozo had a strong intellectual law program.  So it was easy to vote for my own school.

And it wasn't hard to find a few other schools to vote for.  This profession is lousy with intellectual law specialists.  I sent back the survey in triumph.  I knew I'd contributed to the state of legal education in America.

I'm not troubled by having ranking systems out there, and perhaps we ought to embrace them even more emphatically than we do.  It's snarky to question U.S. News's proofreading.  But it did make the enterprise feel a little shallow.