“I am very pleased to share the fabulous news that Professor Jeremy Waldron has accepted our tenured offer and will join us in Fall 2006,” he wrote. Then came the kicker: “Jeremy is currently a University Professor and Professor of Law at Columbia.”

He is also the third Columbia Law School professor to announce his intention to join N.Y.U.’s faculty in the past year.

The three moves would seem to be a break in the standoff between the two law schools that has existed since the late 1980’s, when two law professors defected in the opposite direction—from N.Y.U. to Columbia.

In the intervening years, the schools have become an academic anomaly: ultra-competitive law schools essentially tied in the rankings (U.S. News and World Report has Columbia and N.Y.U. locked as the fourth- and fifth-best, respectively, in the country) and located in the same city. The faculty at Columbia often considers N.Y.U. faculty members academic second cousins, and vice versa. They co-teach classes and occasionally “visit” at one another’s campuses. But they never stay.

In part, that’s because there’s very little impetus to move, since so much about teaching at the two schools is the same. Now, the threshold for drawing professors from one school to another is being tested—and many New Yorkers see it as an aggressive move that has upset the equilibrium between the two schools.

Mr. Waldron was a big coup: He’s one of the foremost legal and political philosophers in the world right now. Last month, labor and employment-law professor Cynthia Estlund accepted an N.Y.U. offer. Over the summer, her husband, civil-procedure and voting-rights expert Samuel Issacharoff, joined N.Y.U. permanently.

In a word—fabulous!

But Mr. Waldron was really N.Y.U.’s white whale. He’s a Goliath in legal philosophy, which has emerged as one of N.Y.U.’s marquee fields—one that Columbia had dominated over a long history dating back to the 1930’s.

Mr. Waldron said that he moved because he wanted to work closely with N.Y.U.’s legal philosophers—including the titan of the field, 73-year-old Ronald Dworkin. Along with the eminent political philosopher Thomas Nagel, Mr. Dworkin holds court every Thursday afternoon in the fall at the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy, where the two dissect a (quaking) scholar’s paper.

Mr. Waldron is their obvious successor. (“It’s a little bit silly. Dworkin is perfectly active, isn’t he? He doesn’t need any sort of heir,” responded Mr. Waldron.)

But unlike Mr. Dworkin, whose influence is felt everywhere but seldom seen outside of academia, Mr. Waldron has a broad public persona. He writes book reviews and letters to the editor in The New York Times, debates John Yoo on torture. Just last year, Columbia recognized his popularity when it appointed him to serve as a University Professor, a high honor that allows him to teach across disciplines in various schools within the university.

Faculty members at Columbia were quick to characterize the recent departures as isolated events related to individual professors’ preferences.

“People make decisions for personal reasons, and it’s the kind of environment where people move on,” said David Schizer, the dean of Columbia’s law school. “We have such an amazing faculty, and one sign of that is that people have other options.”

But for the faculty at N.Y.U., the three hires are also cited as evidence of a tipping point. It’s about superiority over—not parity with—Columbia Law, part of an Ivy League university whose prestige is a birthright. As recently as 2004, the word was that the N.Y.U. Law School was on the rocks, having lost several important scholars. But two years later, the story is very different.

“After Monday, I think there will be a little bit of a glow,” said Professor Marcel Kahan on the Friday before the Waldron announcement was made public. Mr. Kahan emphasized that it was the infusion of the Columbia émigré’s talents into the N.Y.U. mix that made the news noteworthy. But he allowed himself this: “They will have a hard time maintaining that they are better than we are.”

“People are mostly interested in what intellectual community will be most supportive of their work,” Mr. Revesz said. “I think we have a great intellectual community, and I’m very pleased that they’ve recognized that.”

Nor could he resist a dig at his uptown rival.

“I think any objective observer would say that we now have, sort of across the board, a faculty that is stronger in many, many more areas, and that is very exciting.”

And if a genteel aura surrounds the comings and goings of these august lawmen, there was still the faint hint of an old-fashioned duel in the air.

Of course, in the era of academic free agency, N.Y.U. had better watch its back.

“Maybe there will be more,” said Mr. Schizer, the Columbia law dean, about the moves between his school and N.Y.U. “Going forward, we certainly have our eye on a couple of people. The atmosphere now is that people are becoming increasingly mobile.

“It makes it fun to be a dean,” he added. “There are more opportunities to hire really great people.”

The Long Détente

At one time, it might have been thought fun to be the dean of Columbia Law because it consistently beat N.Y.U. in the rankings. Columbia has dominated on that score since its founding in 1858, at times spoken of in the same breath as the Harvard and Yale law schools.

While N.Y.U. Law is 23 years older, it has only been in recent decades that the school’s reputation put it out of the class of local law schools catering to commuter students.

That had already begun to change by 1988—the year John Sexton assumed the deanship of the law school: N.Y.U. had climbed up the ranks to the No. 9 slot the previous year.

Mr. Sexton compounded the school’s prestige by luring faculty from highly regarded schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

Things were changing in New York: It was suddenly becoming a desirable place to live, and thanks to a unique financial arrangement the law school had developed with the larger university, it could offer housing—some of it quite luxurious—in the school’s increasingly attractive Greenwich Village surroundings.

The school developed a buzzy momentum. So it was propelled into the upper echelon of what one faculty member termed “high-end legal education.”

But, according to a source, there was initially a price to be paid for Mr. Sexton’s ascent: Professor David Leebron left for Columbia the following year. The two had been rivals since their days on the Harvard Law Review.

A second faculty member, Jeffrey Gordon, left in 1988 to run a center on law and economic studies at Columbia, which was building a stronger corporate and mergers-and-acquisitions faculty at the time.

“John Sexton told me that he had the opportunity to poach [from Columbia], but that he decided not to poach,” said Jules Coleman, a law professor at Yale who is close to Mr. Sexton.

In 1996, Mr. Leebron became the dean at Columbia. One senior professor said he had heard that the longtime competitors had an understanding not to recruit aggressively from each other’s schools.

“I think the assumption was that it would be too upsetting,” said the source, who didn’t want to be identified because he could not assert it as fact. “It would make relationships between the two schools unsettled … and unfriendly.” The agreement “would be a way of saying … ‘Let’s have nuclear disarmament.’”

Mr. Sexton and Mr. Leebron did not respond to requests for comment made through their spokesmen. Other knowledgeable sources denied that there had ever been an agreement, even an informal one. They said that the reason there had been no raiding wasn’t because the schools weren’t interested. (Not to mention the potential anti-trust concerns—paging Alfred Taubman!) They were interested, and both deans made overtures. But they may not have needed an agreement, since no one wanted to move badly enough.

Even so, Columbia and N.Y.U. regularly competed both for entry-level candidates and lateral hires from outside New York. In 1999, for the first time, N.Y.U. placed one notch above Columbia in the U.S. News and World Report pecking order, a feat they repeated in 2000.

In 2002, Mr. Sexton was promoted to university president, and Mr. Revesz, an environmental-law scholar, succeeded him as dean. Mr. Leebron announced in December 2003 that he was stepping down to run Rice University.

So the old standoff was at an end. Meanwhile, the search for a dean to replace Mr. Leebron was roiling the waters at Columbia.

Many law schools follow a dean-search model in which the university president makes an appointment in consultation with a committee that includes some faculty members from the law school and other faculty members outside it. Columbia follows what is known as an open or “faculty democracy” model. The process is akin to a popular election, with professors voting among candidates for the job.

Columbia professors who threw their hats in the ring were thus subjected to the public scrutiny of their peers—an uncommon and unwelcome development for law dons well into their tenured professorships.

“Everyone was eligible to vote, and so everyone was eligible to be lobbied … You wanted your candidate to do well, so you ended up saying things that were negative about other candidates,” said one person close to the situation, who requested anonymity because he did not want to generate publicity for the news. “We had a really, really good result, [but] the process itself generated a lot of frustration and ill will on the faculty.”

Among the candidates were Mr. Issacharoff and Carol Sanger, a family-law and feminist legal scholar who is Mr. Waldron’s longtime companion. The faculty chose a 35-year-old whippersnapper and tax scholar, David Schizer, for the job.

Mr. Issacharoff, a revered teacher who had expressed strong views about the kind of intellectual heavyweight needed to direct the school, visited at N.Y.U. the following year, through an arrangement he had made before the deanship shake-up. He never returned to Columbia.

“This is the last reverberation of the dean-search process we had,” said The Observer’s source. “The people who left were the people who were most closely affected by the dean search.”

So why didn’t all the moves happen immediately after the election of Mr. Schizer? And if Mr. Waldron feels that Ms. Sanger was mistreated, then why is he—not she—leaving?

“People need to consider their positions very carefully; they’re not required to act precipitously,” said Mr. Waldron, N.Y.U.’s latest acquisition. Ms. Sanger declined to comment. (Mr. Waldron has an outstanding offer on the table from Harvard, which has also made Ms. Sanger a visiting offer.)

Mr. Issacharoff wouldn’t comment on whether the circumstances of the dean search were the catalyst for his move to N.Y.U.

“People make decisions for many reasons,” he said, pointing to a cohort of scholars at the school working in his fields of complex litigation, governing and the political process. “I accepted at N.Y.U. because I liked the fit better.”

He added, “As I told David Schizer, I said ‘this is not on your watch. This is because of things that have been a source of frustration for me at Columbia for a long time.’”

“I think that would be a very simplistic way of describing what motivated me or anybody to move. It’s bound to be more complicated than that, isn’t it?” Ms. Estlund said when presented with the hypothesis that she had left as a result of the bloody dean search. “These are just always personal and idiosyncratic decisions. I think Columbia is a great place.”

And not everyone associated with the dean search was left wounded. Robert Scott, a professor and former dean of the University of Virginia Law School, was a finalist along with Mr. Schizer for the Columbia deanship, until he withdrew near the end of the process.

Now he and his wife Elizabeth, who is also a professor, are joining the Columbia faculty in July.

Fabulous. But when will the N.Y.U. professors start signing up?

“I am very pleased to share the fabulous news that Professor Jeremy Waldron has accepted our tenured offer and will join us in Fall 2006,” he wrote. Then came the kicker: “Jeremy is currently a University Professor and Professor of Law at Columbia.”

He is also the third Columbia Law School professor to announce his intention to join N.Y.U.’s faculty in the past year.

The three moves would seem to be a break in the standoff between the two law schools that has existed since the late 1980’s, when two law professors defected in the opposite direction—from N.Y.U. to Columbia.

In the intervening years, the schools have become an academic anomaly: ultra-competitive law schools essentially tied in the rankings ( U.S. News and World Report has Columbia and N.Y.U. locked as the fourth- and fifth-best, respectively, in the country) and located in the same city. The faculty at Columbia often considers N.Y.U. faculty members academic second cousins, and vice versa. They co-teach classes and occasionally “visit” at one another’s campuses. But they never stay.

In part, that’s because there’s very little impetus to move, since so much about teaching at the two schools is the same. Now, the threshold for drawing professors from one school to another is being tested—and many New Yorkers see it as an aggressive move that has upset the equilibrium between the two schools.

Mr. Waldron was a big coup: He’s one of the foremost legal and political philosophers in the world right now. Last month, labor and employment-law professor Cynthia Estlund accepted an N.Y.U. offer. Over the summer, her husband, civil-procedure and voting-rights expert Samuel Issacharoff, joined N.Y.U. permanently.

In a word—fabulous!

But Mr. Waldron was really N.Y.U.’s white whale. He’s a Goliath in legal philosophy, which has emerged as one of N.Y.U.’s marquee fields—one that Columbia had dominated over a long history dating back to the 1930’s.

Mr. Waldron said that he moved because he wanted to work closely with N.Y.U.’s legal philosophers—including the titan of the field, 73-year-old Ronald Dworkin. Along with the eminent political philosopher Thomas Nagel, Mr. Dworkin holds court every Thursday afternoon in the fall at the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy, where the two dissect a (quaking) scholar’s paper.

Mr. Waldron is their obvious successor. (“It’s a little bit silly. Dworkin is perfectly active, isn’t he? He doesn’t need any sort of heir,” responded Mr. Waldron.)

But unlike Mr. Dworkin, whose influence is felt everywhere but seldom seen outside of academia, Mr. Waldron has a broad public persona. He writes book reviews and letters to the editor in The New York Times, debates John Yoo on torture. Just last year, Columbia recognized his popularity when it appointed him to serve as a University Professor, a high honor that allows him to teach across disciplines in various schools within the university.

Faculty members at Columbia were quick to characterize the recent departures as isolated events related to individual professors’ preferences.

“People make decisions for personal reasons, and it’s the kind of environment where people move on,” said David Schizer, the dean of Columbia’s law school. “We have such an amazing faculty, and one sign of that is that people have other options.”

But for the faculty at N.Y.U., the three hires are also cited as evidence of a tipping point. It’s about superiority over—not parity with—Columbia Law, part of an Ivy League university whose prestige is a birthright. As recently as 2004, the word was that the N.Y.U. Law School was on the rocks, having lost several important scholars. But two years later, the story is very different.

“After Monday, I think there will be a little bit of a glow,” said Professor Marcel Kahan on the Friday before the Waldron announcement was made public. Mr. Kahan emphasized that it was the infusion of the Columbia émigré’s talents into the N.Y.U. mix that made the news noteworthy. But he allowed himself this: “They will have a hard time maintaining that they are better than we are.”

“People are mostly interested in what intellectual community will be most supportive of their work,” Mr. Revesz said. “I think we have a great intellectual community, and I’m very pleased that they’ve recognized that.”

Nor could he resist a dig at his uptown rival.

“I think any objective observer would say that we now have, sort of across the board, a faculty that is stronger in many, many more areas, and that is very exciting.”

And if a genteel aura surrounds the comings and goings of these august lawmen, there was still the faint hint of an old-fashioned duel in the air.

Of course, in the era of academic free agency, N.Y.U. had better watch its back.

“Maybe there will be more,” said Mr. Schizer, the Columbia law dean, about the moves between his school and N.Y.U. “Going forward, we certainly have our eye on a couple of people. The atmosphere now is that people are becoming increasingly mobile.

“It makes it fun to be a dean,” he added. “There are more opportunities to hire really great people.”

The Long Détente

At one time, it might have been thought fun to be the dean of Columbia Law because it consistently beat N.Y.U. in the rankings. Columbia has dominated on that score since its founding in 1858, at times spoken of in the same breath as the Harvard and Yale law schools.

While N.Y.U. Law is 23 years older, it has only been in recent decades that the school’s reputation put it out of the class of local law schools catering to commuter students.

That had already begun to change by 1988—the year John Sexton assumed the deanship of the law school: N.Y.U. had climbed up the ranks to the No. 9 slot the previous year.

Mr. Sexton compounded the school’s prestige by luring faculty from highly regarded schools like the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

Things were changing in New York: It was suddenly becoming a desirable place to live, and thanks to a unique financial arrangement the law school had developed with the larger university, it could offer housing—some of it quite luxurious—in the school’s increasingly attractive Greenwich Village surroundings.

The school developed a buzzy momentum. So it was propelled into the upper echelon of what one faculty member termed “high-end legal education.”

But, according to a source, there was initially a price to be paid for Mr. Sexton’s ascent: Professor David Leebron left for Columbia the following year. The two had been rivals since their days on the Harvard Law Review.

A second faculty member, Jeffrey Gordon, left in 1988 to run a center on law and economic studies at Columbia, which was building a stronger corporate and mergers-and-acquisitions faculty at the time.

“John Sexton told me that he had the opportunity to poach [from Columbia], but that he decided not to poach,” said Jules Coleman, a law professor at Yale who is close to Mr. Sexton.

In 1996, Mr. Leebron became the dean at Columbia. One senior professor said he had heard that the longtime competitors had an understanding not to recruit aggressively from each other’s schools.

“I think the assumption was that it would be too upsetting,” said the source, who didn’t want to be identified because he could not assert it as fact. “It would make relationships between the two schools unsettled … and unfriendly.” The agreement “would be a way of saying … ‘Let’s have nuclear disarmament.’”

Mr. Sexton and Mr. Leebron did not respond to requests for comment made through their spokesmen. Other knowledgeable sources denied that there had ever been an agreement, even an informal one. They said that the reason there had been no raiding wasn’t because the schools weren’t interested. (Not to mention the potential anti-trust concerns—paging Alfred Taubman!) They were interested, and both deans made overtures. But they may not have needed an agreement, since no one wanted to move badly enough.

Even so, Columbia and N.Y.U. regularly competed both for entry-level candidates and lateral hires from outside New York. In 1999, for the first time, N.Y.U. placed one notch above Columbia in the U.S. News and World Report pecking order, a feat they repeated in 2000.

In 2002, Mr. Sexton was promoted to university president, and Mr. Revesz, an environmental-law scholar, succeeded him as dean. Mr. Leebron announced in December 2003 that he was stepping down to run Rice University.

So the old standoff was at an end. Meanwhile, the search for a dean to replace Mr. Leebron was roiling the waters at Columbia.

Many law schools follow a dean-search model in which the university president makes an appointment in consultation with a committee that includes some faculty members from the law school and other faculty members outside it. Columbia follows what is known as an open or “faculty democracy” model. The process is akin to a popular election, with professors voting among candidates for the job.

Columbia professors who threw their hats in the ring were thus subjected to the public scrutiny of their peers—an uncommon and unwelcome development for law dons well into their tenured professorships.

“Everyone was eligible to vote, and so everyone was eligible to be lobbied … You wanted your candidate to do well, so you ended up saying things that were negative about other candidates,” said one person close to the situation, who requested anonymity because he did not want to generate publicity for the news. “We had a really, really good result, [but] the process itself generated a lot of frustration and ill will on the faculty.”

Among the candidates were Mr. Issacharoff and Carol Sanger, a family-law and feminist legal scholar who is Mr. Waldron’s longtime companion. The faculty chose a 35-year-old whippersnapper and tax scholar, David Schizer, for the job.

Mr. Issacharoff, a revered teacher who had expressed strong views about the kind of intellectual heavyweight needed to direct the school, visited at N.Y.U. the following year, through an arrangement he had made before the deanship shake-up. He never returned to Columbia.

“This is the last reverberation of the dean-search process we had,” said The Observer’s source. “The people who left were the people who were most closely affected by the dean search.”

So why didn’t all the moves happen immediately after the election of Mr. Schizer? And if Mr. Waldron feels that Ms. Sanger was mistreated, then why is he—not she—leaving?

“People need to consider their positions very carefully; they’re not required to act precipitously,” said Mr. Waldron, N.Y.U.’s latest acquisition. Ms. Sanger declined to comment. (Mr. Waldron has an outstanding offer on the table from Harvard, which has also made Ms. Sanger a visiting offer.)

Mr. Issacharoff wouldn’t comment on whether the circumstances of the dean search were the catalyst for his move to N.Y.U.

“People make decisions for many reasons,” he said, pointing to a cohort of scholars at the school working in his fields of complex litigation, governing and the political process. “I accepted at N.Y.U. because I liked the fit better.”

He added, “As I told David Schizer, I said ‘this is not on your watch. This is because of things that have been a source of frustration for me at Columbia for a long time.’”

“I think that would be a very simplistic way of describing what motivated me or anybody to move. It’s bound to be more complicated than that, isn’t it?” Ms. Estlund said when presented with the hypothesis that she had left as a result of the bloody dean search. “These are just always personal and idiosyncratic decisions. I think Columbia is a great place.”

And not everyone associated with the dean search was left wounded. Robert Scott, a professor and former dean of the University of Virginia Law School, was a finalist along with Mr. Schizer for the Columbia deanship, until he withdrew near the end of the process.

Now he and his wife Elizabeth, who is also a professor, are joining the Columbia faculty in July.

Fabulous. But when will the N.Y.U. professors start signing up?

The proposed hire dovetails with a plan at Columbia to establish a civil-rights law center, possibly in collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, among other nonprofits.

“We would love to collaborate with nonprofit organizations to give them advice about specific issues related to them—mostly issues related to racial justice,” law school dean David Schizer told The Observer. “The idea is, if you can get really first-rate faculty to talk—to spend time—with leading civil-rights advocates, they will come up with very interesting ideas.”

You may know Ms. Guinier as the “Quota Queen,” whose nomination by then-President Bill Clinton to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was abruptly withdrawn in 1993 amid conservative caricatures of her writings advocating a variation on proportional representation. Her recent work, which has been greatly influential in the liberal jurisprudential jet set, examines a range of civil-rights concerns, including the role of race and gender in the political process.

“I think, in Lani Guinier’s case, there’s some interest in helping to put together a civil-rights center at Columbia,” said Professor Thomas Merrill, who heads the appointments committee.

She hasn’t yet accepted the offer, and even if she does, it wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d be leaving Harvard permanently.

Nor is she the only Harvard Law professor sought by Columbia: Another visiting professorship has been offered to leading criminal-law scholar (and outspoken evangelical Christian) William Stuntz.

Visiting offers generally fall into three categories: “podium” visits, where a school really needs a single course in a professor’s specialty; “enrichment” visits, when the school knows the faculty member is going to stay where he or she is, but wants to punch up its program for a semester or a year; and “look-see” visits, when prospective mates are checking each other out to see if they want to commit.

“These, from our perspective, we hope that they’re ‘look-see’ visits,” said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia.

Indeed, particularly in Ms. Guinier’s case—because of the opportunities the civil-rights center might present—Columbia’s offer smells of a play. Ms. Guinier declined to comment.

Ms. Guinier does have professional ties to Columbia. Susan Sturm, Ms. Guinier’s collaborator on several articles as well as a book, is a professor at the law school.

“There is a large cohort of people she might be interested in hanging out with,” Mr. Merrill said.

Before moving to Cambridge, Ms. Guinier taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Harvard had a substantial courtship period with her, a period marked by tumult at the school.

She was first invited to visit at Harvard Law School in 1992. The most senior black member of the Harvard Law School faculty, Derrick Bell Jr., had recently resigned in protest over the absence of a minority-woman faculty member. Students had brought a lawsuit—later dismissed—against the university, alleging that faculty hiring was discriminatory. Ms. Guinier “wasn’t ready,” she told an interviewer for the law-school alumni bulletin in 1999. “The School was embroiled in controversy about faculty hiring,” she said. “I was loath to walk into the middle of it.”

But after experiencing the fallout of her nomination to the Justice Department, nothing seemed intimidating.

“After that grueling experience, I was less worried about how I would fare if I were at the center of a public controversy,” she recalled. She visited for the law school’s short winter term in 1996, and was shortly thereafter made a permanent offer. Ms. Guinier finally joined the faculty—as their first tenured black woman—in the summer of 1998.

Ivy War?

Mr. Schizer said he was aiming to raise between $5 million and $10 million for the civil-rights law center, which he hopes will be up and running by the fall. He declined to identify the nonprofit groups with whom the school will partner, but other professors said that the school was in talks with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Fund president Theodore Shaw was traveling and couldn’t be reached for comment.

“I think this is sort of new territory. We’re not looking so much to be a litigation arm; we’re not looking to write briefs for them. We’re looking to write the objective, scholarly briefs that we’ve always done,” said Mr. Schizer. “We might give input about strategic thinking.”

According to several legal scholars interviewed by The Observer, that appears to be the future of civil-rights law. Federal courts have gotten more conservative over the past 30 years—which means lawyers are focusing more of their attention on state constitutions and non-litigation advocacy efforts.

But the civil-rights law center is not the first initiative that the 37-year-old Mr. Schizer has undertaken since he assumed the deanship of Columbia Law School a year and a half ago.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, hedge-fund manager Alphonse Fletcher Jr. recently pledged $3.2 million over five years toward a professorship “to study issues related to race and social justice, including education, criminal justice and affirmative action.” It will be held by Jack Greenberg, former director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Moving the law school into such a highly visible—and hotly contested—area of practice is one way to heighten the school’s profile in the coming years.

In that department, Mr. Schizer has his work cut out for him. In the most recent U.S. News and World Report, Columbia’s law school is ranked fourth in the country, just above New York University School of Law; Harvard is ranked second, below Yale Law School and above third-place Stanford University.

Watching the jockeying for position in that high echelon is a spectator sport for lawyers—and for New York, the stakes are high.

Brian Leiter, head of the law and philosophy program at the University of Texas at Austin, is an inveterate oddsmaker.

“Yale and Harvard dominate everyone else in the legal academy,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Observer. “Fifty years ago that wasn’t true, Yale/Harvard/Columbia were the dominant triumvirate of legal education. Stanford’s rise to prominence came at the expense of Columbia (Stanford raided the Columbia faculty in the early 1960s), and since then Columbia has not generally been as competitive with Yale and Harvard.”

Indeed, what the rankings don’t reflect is the gulf in prestige between second-place Harvard and the two New York schools that take up the fourth and fifth slots.

The central battleground between the schools is in the hiring of law professors. And lately, Harvard—not content to be beaten year after year by the Elis—has become a particularly aggressive jockey.

In 2004, Harvard poached one of the most hotly sought-after legal conservatives, John Manning, then a professor at Columbia.

But Columbia won the next round: Elizabeth Emens, a promising contracts and family-law scholar, received offers from both Columbia and Harvard, and she chose Columbia.

“We managed to beat Harvard on that one,” said Mr. Merrill.

In the meantime, Harvard, which is on a hiring tear, has made offers to legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron and legal historian and torts scholar John Witt. And, according to Mr. Schizer, Columbia is going to be voting on additional visiting offers to other Harvard and Yale Law School faculty later this year.

Mr. Stuntz, who is less well known outside the rarefied world of legal scholarship but is a powerful force within it, has personal reasons for wanting to come to New York, he said in an e-mail. Mr. Stuntz often writes about Christian values and the legal system. He co-wrote a criminal-law casebook with Columbia Law professor Debra Livingston (and two other scholars).

He wrote that he will be spending six weeks at Columbia during his sabbatical in the fall.

“Columbia’s faculty hasn’t offered me a permanent position yet, and I haven’t committed to accepting such an offer if it were made. But my understanding is that they’re interested, and I’m interested. I don’t know how to assess the odds, but I’m genuinely uncertain where I’ll be spending the balance of my career. I’m taking this very seriously.”

He added: “Harvard is also a great place, from my perspective: I have wonderful colleagues and students, and I have enormous admiration for my current Dean, Elena Kagan. I’m not thinking about Columbia because of any dissatisfaction with Harvard.”

Mr. Stuntz joined that faculty in 2000; there, he has a position in the dean’s cabinet as vice dean for intellectual life.

So the offer might be seen as an attack on Harvard’s innermost circle—which, if it succeeds, will be good for business at Columbia. And it’s only the beginning.

“Columbia is that hot school right now,” Mr. Schizer said. “We are very competitive with Harvard and Yale, and we expect to hire a few people away from each of those schools.”

"The state of Israel is one of the few shining achievements of an otherwise bleak 20th century," he opined. "I believe that Israelis have the right and duty to defend their homes and families."

His aggressive position-taking might have prompted its own share of outrage if it hadn't been swiftly sidelined by an equally global and divisive issue of our century: spam. In creating this listgroup, someone in Columbia's communication office-the culprit or the facilitator, depending on where you stand on the outcome-had deleted an essential line of code that would have directed all the replies to the dean's inbox and prevented the recipients from spraying their thoughts across the country like crop fertilizer.

"Bianca Russo/JPMCHASE is out of the office" was one of the first of several hundred e-mails the esteemed esquires downloaded after clicking "Send/Receive."

Quickly, the litigious responses started streaming in. "This is an unacceptable intrusion on my time," fumed Vincent Palladino, a partner at Ropes and Gray. (Later, he contritely told The Observer: "In retrospect, I overreacted. But it is a measure of how intrusive e-mail can be that I did so.")

"You are flooding my inbox with stuff I have no interest in. I find it very unprofessional," was the stiff, sober response from a 1986 alumna, Florence Cameron, with a less-than-professional e-mail handle: Sitcomlady. ("I use a totally different e-mail address for my legal career and connections," she wrote later in an e-mail to The Observer. "I also had no idea that I was responding to everyone.")

Of course, such responses went out to all, triggering once again the automatic "out of office" responses. After the fact, one alum likened it to being stuck in an elevator-a very, very large elevator.

People responded true to form.

"Please remove me from your list," wrote Charles Fried somewhat dispassionately. The Harvard Law professor was Solicitor General under President Reagan. ("They can deal with me by mail," he told The Observer about his alma mater.)

"Thanks for the article," was the breezier response from Byron Swift, an environmental lawyer.

Angry messages were met with responses from those-perhaps not litigators-who tried to soothe their former classmates with explanations. "The problem, I believe, is that whenever you reply to the above e-mail address, it automatically forwards your response to everyone on the list. So everyone should stop replying to this e-mail," calmly assessed Eric Grannis, a.k.a. Mr. Eva Moskowitz, perhaps a little too confident in the capacity for rational decision-making of his professional peers. ("The concept that you have to be a prick to be a good litigator is just wrong," Mr. Grannis, who is a litigator, protested when we pointed out his politeness.)

Others were more collegial. In fact, for slightly more than an hour-the time it took administrators to realize the extent of the problem and disable the list-the Columbia Law School community was pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in a kind of reluctant, but nevertheless cozy, hug. "I have only received four 'out of office' messages, which suggests that, as a whole, our collective noses are to the grindstone. Regards to all, and keep up the good work," toasted Len Weiser-Varon, a corporate lawyer in Boston.

Others were less sanguine. "I wish I were on vacation, too," mused Heidi DuBois, an associate in Debevoise and Plimpton's tax department, to the thousands of others who could probably relate. (Ms. DuBois explained to The Observer that she wished she had been out so she "could have avoided the 'out of office' e-mails.")

Finally, the tentative chumminess took its final turn, toward inevitable pitching: "'92 class graduate here …. If anyone is looking for a good special education lawyer, give me a call," wrote Julie Gaughran. ("I'm ashamed to say, I think I was the only one who was tacky enough to plug my firm," Ms. Gaughran said later, though she wasn't-and another attorney posted an ad for a used Volkswagen. She added that she'd thought, "Hey, this is a rare opportunity. This will be my only 10 seconds on a national stage-why not?")

Reflecting on the e-mail-exchange experience, Ms. Gaughran found it a trip. "It was certainly more pleasant than going to a reunion. You didn't have to diet; you didn't have to smile," she said.

Mr. Schizer apologized for the glitch, saying it hadn't happened before with the six or seven e-mails he's sent since starting as dean in July. (Because he's worried the technology may trigger the same glitch, he's not e-mailing that sentiment.)

"I do regret the inconvenience this may have caused people," he said. Nevertheless, "a few people said, 'The glitch helped me to catch up with some people I hadn't been in touch with before.' So that was pretty funny, too."

Phineas Leahey, class of 2002, a grave-sounding Davis Polk and Wardwell associate, made a rather precocious contribution: "In any event, having to delete a 'flood' (hyperbole?) of e-mails is outweighed by the widespread interest," he wrote with all the solemnity of a justice penning a decision. "Requests for removal should, of course, be respected."

When we caught up with him later, he described what he meant by "interest" a little more specifically.

"The mass e-mail that at first seems to divide the 10,000 alumni (or their representatives in the exchanges)," he wrote in an e-mail to The Observer, "reunited former classmates, introduced former graduates to each other and may have even sparked romances."