I've Got a Golden Ticket

Last year, I purchased over 400 copies of the U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings edition. I was hoping to find one of the five golden tickets that the magazine had hidden throughout the country, tickets that would give me (and the four other lucky winners) a free tour of the top-secret rankings factory where the magazine creates its famous lists.

My hope, of course, was to be able to slip away from the tour guide in the ultra-secret inventing room, where the rankings are prepared in strange futuristic machines and magical cauldrons, and quietly stir in a few extra ingredients –- perhaps a glossy brochure or two -- that might move my law school up the list, or convince Mr. Wonka (or Gene Wilder, or Johnny Depp, or Spike Milligan, or whoever was giving the tour) to do for me what he had once done for Charlie, with his Chocolate Factory, which is to retire and give me the keys to the place. Or perhaps just declare me (or perhaps, less nonsensically, the law school of my choice) to be the number one law school in the United States.

That didn’t happen. But, as you can see, I *am* apparently one of the lucky golden-ticket winners invited to PrawfsBlawg’s corner of the blogosphere this month, and for that I am very grateful to the PrawfsBlawg team for this first stint as a blogger. That will give me the chance to write – in future posts – about why the above-described Wonkaesque ranking system might be just as good as the one we really have, about teaching with and without holograms, about freedom of expression and privacy law (the two areas that are the focus of my recent scholarship), and about the time I was put under surveillance in London while looking for the place where the band Pink Floyd got its start.