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In a career that is as prestige-based as Law, perception matters, and more and more what drives that perception is what students say on internet message boards.

Over the past few years, a nexus of the U.S. News & World Report Rankings and internet discussion board buzz has given rise to a grouping of the "Top 14" law schools (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, NYU, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, Georgetown, and Berkley), a cluster that did not exist in previous generations.

University of Texas Professor Brian Leiter takes aim at this phenomenon in a recent post on his blog, Leiter Law School Reports. Leiter argues that placement statistics and faculty quality assessments fail to bear out the notion that there is anything distinctive about these so called "Top 14" schools, when compared to those U.S. News ranks immediately below them (for example, UCLA and Leiter's own Texas).

This could, however, be one instance of perception giving birth to reality. As more students become convinced of a demarcation around the "Top 14," more qualified students will hone in on these schools, boosting admissions statistics and student quality within this tier and eventually putting the distance between UCLA and Georgetown that so many already perceive.

Duke University certainly recognizes the potential of internet discussion boards to drive application decisions. A recent article in The Devil's Advocate alludes to the generation of internet discussion board buzz as one of the motivations behind its institution of an innovative invitation-only Early Action admissions program this year.