If U.S. News Goes Under, What Will Law Professors Complain About?

Law professors, and particularly law school deans, love to complain about the law school rankings done every year by U.S. News & World Report. (Unless their school rises in the rankings, in which case they are an objective measure of merit.) It’s been pretty well demonstrated that, more than a decade into the rankings project, the primary thing the U.S. News rankings measure is how well the school did on previous years’ rankings. In other words, there’s a massive feedback loop going on that is difficult for any one school to break out of. Nevertheless, schools try, because students and even professors, despite their complaints, rely on the rankings to evaluate the worth of various schools.

People have been wondering how to change this dynamic for a long time. Some, like Brian Leiter, have set up their own rankings, although Leiter’s system only measures the top 40 schools or so, where rankings are arguably less important. But what if U.S. News folded? The company seems to be in deep trouble. It’s recently given up on competing with Time and Newsweek in the weekly magazine market, becoming biweekly instead. Today’s New York Times reports that it’s giving up on that plan, too, even before it went into effect: now USN&WR will become a monthly magazine instead. A monthly news magazine? I think the likely next step will be for USN&WR to announce that it’s becoming a magazine with an infinitely long publication cycle, i.e., folding up shop.

If that happens, who will law professors have to kick around anymore?

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The Long March

In November, 1868, the newly freed slaves in South Carolina turned out to vote in the first presidential election they had ever been allowed to participate in. It was a momentous occasion; hundreds of thousands of persons who had been deprived of their rights for centuries were now finally able to enjoy all of the privileges of citizenship, including the right of suffrage. Voting in the 1860s meant travelling long distances to the county seat to cast a ballot, often requiring an overnight stay; it was an arduous process, but they were eager to make the attempt.

But many in 1868 found that they had made the trip for nothing. Armed militias of whites, determined to prevent blacks from voting, arose all across the South, particularly in South Carolina. Acting at the direction of Democratic party leaders, these bands of vigilantes, sometimes calling themselves Ku Klux Klans, confiscated Republican ballots, threatened prospective voters, and assassinated Republican candidates for office. On the two days of the November election, hundreds of armed whites rode all over upcountry South Carolina, surrounding polling stations and preventing blacks from entering. The tactic was a success; blacks were denied the right to vote in several South Carolina counties, and the local Democratic ticket was elected by large majorities in all of them.

And so, it is a measure of the distance we have come in 140 years, that yesterday an African-American man was elected as President of the United States, on the Democratic Party ticket, in an election that was almost entirely peaceful.

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The Scrabulous Lawsuit: Heading Toward Default?

I’ve posted extensively recently on Hasbro v. RJ Softwares, the Scrabulous lawsuit, including a four-part series on PrawfsBlawg and two posts here on the similar litigation in India. See my last post for links to all of those materials, and see this article for background if you’re just tuning in.

In the PrawfsBlawg series, I noted a number of interesting legal issues that might be raised during any litigation or, even better, appeal of the dispute between Hasbro, the owners of the North American rights to Scrabble, and RJ Softwares et al., the makers of Scrabulous. In particular, I noted some surprising weaknesses with Hasbro’s copyright claims, including the blackletter rule that games are not copyrightable, lack of ownership over the Scrabble dictionary, and the apparent lack of registration of the Scrabble letter tiles. Even more troubling, I noted a possible formalities problem with all of the Scrabble copyrights dating back to the original 1948 registrations. On the plus side for Hasbro, I questioned the purpose of the under-theorized blackletter rule, although I ultimately concluded it played an important role in copyright law.

Much as I would like to see these issues play out in court, however, I may not get that chance. On Thursday, Hasbro filed proof of service with the court, showing that the defendants were served on August 13. My guess would be that a motion for a default judgement will be hot on its heels. For civ pro junkies, I’ll go into a few more details after the jump.

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