At first glance, an American Bar Association accreditation site visit and a law school’s bid to boost its U.S. News & World Report ranking seem unlikely fodder for a comedic novel. But “Legal Asylum,” a blistering satire by longtime Stanford Law School professor Paul Goldstein, leverages that premise to send up to the legal academy’s obsession with U.S. News and to warn of the rankings’ corrosive impact on law schools.

“Legal Asylum” tells the tale of a fictional state law school in New England whose ambitious dean Elspeth Flowers will stop at nothing to move her institution into U.S. News’ top five. Meanwhile, an ABA accreditation site visit team, a major donor under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a warring law faculty, and a scheming mail room clerk all threaten to derail her efforts.

We caught up with Goldstein, a five-time legal novelist who has taught intellectual property at Stanford since 1975, to discuss the “Legal Asylum” and how he thinks it will be received by his professor colleagues. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Where did the idea for “Legal Asylum” come from?

I’ve been keeping notes in a file for all the time I’ve been in teaching, which is 50 years now. There are all sorts of odd things that have happened. The impact of U.S. News on the life of law schools really crystallized a lot of these thoughts. Take an institution that’s full of really smart, self-centered, self-serious people doing all the things they do, then you add the catalyst of U.S. News, which has put a lot of schools in jeopardy. U.S. News hasn’t put them in jeopardy, but their reactions have proved to be more amusing than I ever would have anticipated. Put those things together and I said, “I just had to write this book.”