New Novel Skewers Law School Rankings, Faculty Politics, And When Legal Education Gets Kinky - Above the Law

"The annual U.S. News rankings transformed law school administration into a blood sport. The apotheosis of the joke that every academic fight is so existentially fierce because the stakes are so cosmically meaningless. The gap between T14 and the TTT matters, but schools mortgaging integrity to move from 50th to 45th makes college football coaches look at deans and say, 'the important thing is that everyone has fun!'"

"Michael Orey's new novel, Dean's List, takes a flamethrower to that whole ecosystem with a glee that only someone who's spent real time inside the machine could muster. Orey, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and the school's head of public affairs since 2010, has navigated egos and institutional PR for almost two decades."

Michael Orey, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and the school's head of public affairs, has written a satirical novel called Dean's List that critiques the intense competition among law schools driven by U.S. News rankings. The novel follows Charles Ogden Dean III as he leads a struggling law school rebranded under Brown University's prestigious name. Orey's background as a legal affairs reporter and PR professional gives him insider knowledge of the legal academy's obsession with rankings and institutional reputation. The novel uses humor to expose how law schools compromise integrity to improve their ranking positions, comparing the stakes to college football coaching. This marks Orey's first fiction work after publishing a nonfiction account of tobacco litigation.

Read at Above the Law