Law school rankings in the United States

Several ranking systems are explicitly designed to focus on employment outcomes at or shortly after graduation, including rankings by the National Law Journal[1] and Law.com.[2]

The National Law Journal ranks the top 50 law schools by the percentage of juris doctor graduates who took jobs at NLJ 250 firms, the nation's largest by headcount as identified by The National Law Journal’s annual survey. It provides an alternative comparison of its own employment-based rankings to the U.S. News rankings.[3] For students who are primarily interested in lucrative employment outcomes rather than scholarly prestige, this comparison may suggest which law schools are most undervalued by the market. However, the National Law Journal ranking is considerably less mainstream due to its specificity and limited viewership compared to U.S. News publications.

U.S. News & World Report organizes rankings into two main sections. The first section is a "Top 145" that lists the top one hundred forty-five schools in order from highest ranked to lowest ranked. While the top 145 law schools are ranked individually, U.S. News groups the remaining schools, or the bottom 25 percent of those that are ranked, into a "Rank Not Published" group.[4] Schools that fall into this category are listed alphabetically and not by actual ranking. U.S. News also ranks each school's specialty programs using a similar method, if applicable. U.S. News ranked 196 schools in 2016. Each school's U.S. News ranking tends to fluctuate annually. U.S. News's ranking system has incurred various criticisms over the years due in no small part to its arbitrary nature. The American Bar Association has issued disclaimers of law school rating systems. The ABA encourages prospective law students to consider a variety of factors in making their choice among schools.[5]

U.S. News rankings are heavily weighted toward "reputation", which is measured through a survey with small sample size and low response rates. The reputation scores are highly correlated with the previous years' reputation scores and may not reflect changes in law school quality over time.

List of T14 law schools

Berkeley

Columbia
NYU

Cornell

Duke

Harvard

Stanford

Chicago
Northwestern

Michigan

Penn

Georgetown

Virginia

Yale

Top 14 law schools (public schools in blue)

The schools that currently hold the top fourteen positions in the U.S. News & World Report ranking of American law schools are:[19]

• Columbia Law School
• Cornell Law School
• Duke University School of Law
• Georgetown University Law Center
• Harvard Law School
• New York University School of Law
• Northwestern University School of Law
• Stanford Law School
• University of California, Berkeley School of Law
• University of Chicago Law School
• University of Michigan Law School
• University of Pennsylvania Law School
• University of Virginia School of Law
• Yale Law School

Social Science Research Network—a repository for draft and completed scholarship in law and the social sciences—publishes monthly rankings of law schools[20] based on the number of times faculty members' scholarship was downloaded. Rankings are available by total number of downloads, total number of downloads within the last 12 months, and downloads per faculty member to adjust for the size of different institutions. SSRN also provides rankings of individual law school faculty members on these metrics.[21]

The 2018 QS World University Rankings for Law ranked 13 U.S. institutions in the top 50 worldwide. The U.S. institutions in the top 10 were Harvard Law School, ranked first, with Yale Law School ranked fourth, Stanford Law School ranked fifth, NYU Law School ranked sixth, UC Berkeley School of Law ranked seventh and Columbia Law School ranked tenth. Every other Law school in U.S. News & World Report's T14 rankings except University of Virginia School of Law and Northwestern University School of Law made the QS top 50. The UCLA School of Law was the only other U.S. school ranked in the top 50.[22]

In 2017, ARWU released its rankings of World universities by Subject Law. Taking into account only the academic strength of the institution, it ranked Harvard Law School the first, NYU Law School the second, Columbia Law the third, Chicago the fourth, Yale the fifth and Georgetown the sixth. Princeton University, which does not have a law school, is nevertheless ranked between 75 - 100 based on faculty from other subjects publishing in law journals.[23]

Among the criticisms of law school rankings is that they are arbitrary in the characteristics they measure and the value given to each one. Another complaint is that a prospective law student should take into account the "fit" and appropriateness of each school, and that there is not a "one size fits all" ranking. Others complain that common rankings shortchange schools due to geographical or demographic reasons. One critic has gone so far as to create a website that sarcastically ranks US magazines.[24] U.S. News is placed alone in the "Third Tier."

The American Bar Association (ABA), has consistently refused to support or participate in law school rankings. Further, the Association of American Law Schools has also voiced criticisms of U.S. News's ranking system. Carl Monk, its former executive director, once went so far as to say "these rankings are a misleading and deceptive, profit-generating commercial enterprise that compromises U.S. News and World Report's journalistic integrity."[25]

As a response to the prevalence of law school rankings, the ABA and the LSAC publish an annual law school guide. This guide, which does not seek to rank or sort law schools by any criteria, instead seeks to provide the reader with a set of standard, important data on which to judge law schools. It contains information on all 200 ABA-Approved Law Schools. This reference, called The Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools is provided free online and also in print for a small cost. A similar guide for Canadian Law Schools is also published by the Law School Admission Council and is called Official Guide to Canadian Law Schools. These guides seek to serve as an alternative to the U.S. News Rankings and law school rankings in general.

Additionally, the American Bar Association issued the MacCrate Report in 1992, which outlined many fundamental problems with modern legal education and called for reform in American law schools.[26] While the report was hailed as a "template for modern legal education", its practice-oriented tenets have met resistance by law schools continually ranked in the "top 13."[27]

U.S. News has not allowed these criticisms to go unanswered. They regularly outline and justify their methodology alongside the rankings, and have even published defenses of their value.[28] Additionally, law professors William Henderson and Andrew Morriss have come out with a study criticizing law schools' (and the ABA's) refusal to adopt any better objective comparison method for the continued widespread reliance on U.S. News.[29] Henderson and Morriss allege that law schools' attempts to "game" their U.S. News ranking by manipulating postgraduation employment statistics or applicant selectivity have led U.S. News to adjust its methodology accordingly, resulting in a counter-productive cycle.[29] They go on to suggest that the ABA should use its accreditation power to mandate greater transparency in law schools' statistical reporting.[29]

In March 2011, Loyola Law School Dean Victor Gold penned an op-ed in the Huffington Post, accusing U.S. News & World Report of "refus[ing] to consider diversity as a factor in its ranking system."[30] Gold asserted that "[t]here is a broad consensus among law school deans and professors that diversity enriches law school education." Loyola, which has a large Asian student body, claims 37% of its students are "minorities," but it does not provide any specifics.

Despite these criticisms, law school rankings in general and those by U.S. News in particular play a role in the world of legal education. This pressure has also resulted in various schools "gaming the rankings."[31] In a March 2003 article in Student Lawyer, Jane Easter Bahls stated that, in order to appear more selective, some law schools reject applicants whose high LSAT scores indicate that they probably would go somewhere else.[32] Other schools, in an attempt to increase the amount of money spent per student, increase tuition and return it to the students as financial aid.[32]