An unsung virtue of law school blogging

Over at the Law Librarian Blog, Joe Hodnicki has a super post puncturing Chapman School of Law's inflated claim to outperform Yale, Harvard, etc. in terms of its "key scholarly output ranking."  Joe's post (which is akin to Brian Leiter's shrewd observations regarding Sextonism in the law schools) is an example of a larger service performed by law bloggers that hasn't been sufficiently appreciated (at least I saw no mention of this in the recent YLJ Pocket Part canvassing of views on the matter.) That service is facilitating truth-in-marketing to students, firms, and other professors.  These absurd claims to preeminence are now vulnerable to, gasp, fact-checking and exposure in a way that would have been much harder to perform just a few years back.  With some luck, law school PR offices (and the deans who serve with them) will think twice before they wildly declaim the greatness of their schools.

H/t: the inimitable Mary McCormick of FSU's can't be beaten law library :-)

Update: Tom Bell responds here.  He writes:

Chapman perhaps committed a gaucherie, granted, in trumpeting its success. And perhaps, as a member of Chapman's faculty, I lack a sufficiently objective view of the matter. It seems to me, though, that Chapman caught flack for truthfully reporting that it did a good job at sharing its scholars' work with the world.