Penn State Law School

Malcolm Gladwell has an article in the current New Yorker about the US News and World Report college rankings. There is quite a lot there that I would like to discuss in another post. For the moment, I will just comment on an anecdote about the appearance of a non-existent law school in a ranking.

Gladwell descibes how Thomas Brennan, who edits a well known ranking of law schools, once sent out a questionnaire to other lawyers asking them to rank law schools and found that Penn State was, as Brennan is quoted as recalling, ranked around fifth. This was strange since there was no law school at Penn State until quite recently (1997 or 2000 in different sources).

This immediately struck me as odd since I remember a similar story about the Princeton Law School, which does not exist and which was also supposed to have made its appearance in a ranking.
The Princeton story is very probably apocryphal and might have  begun with a comment by the dean of New York University Law School in the Dartmouth Law Journal that Princeton would appear in the top twenty law schools if a questionnaire was asked about it.

This story was plausible since it was an apparent example of the halo effect with Princeton's general excellence being reflected in the perception of a school that did not exist.

The problem with Brennan's account retold by Gladwell, which does not appear to be supported by documentary evidence, is that it requires that many lawyers should not only have mistakenly thought that Penn State had  a law school (getting mixed up with the University of Pennsylvania?) but should have been in error about the general quality of the university. Penn State is nowhere near being a top ten or even a top fifty school.

Could this be another academic legend?