Guest Blogger: Law School Almanac

I'm Michael Shaffer, the author of Law School Almanac. Jim Chen seems to think that my fetish for strange new law school rankings will make fun reading for the regulars at MoneyLaw, so I'll be posting a few things and taking questions here for the next couple of weeks. Jim has also kindly offered to host some files with all of the raw data behind my site, for anyone who wants to download and use it. Soon you should find links here to Excel workbooks with most of the data you see in less accessible form over there.

To be honest, I had no idea that anyone was even aware of LSA, other than the handful who have commented on posts from time to time. So I'm a bit in the dark about what, if anything, anyone besides Jim thinks of it. For my first few posts here, I'll try to address some questions that I imagine people might have about the site, including:

- Are you nuts?
- Why did you do this?
- So what does all this data tell us?
- What does it not tell us?
- Seriously though -- are you nuts?

Please add any questions you have as comments on this post, and I'll do my best to respond. I also welcome any criticisms, concerns, and ideas provoked by the data or by my attempts to make some sense of it.