“Top 14” probably should now be the “Top 20” law schools as UC-Berkeley is tied at #16; first time UC-B has not been ranked among the Top 14 law schools. Georgetown is tied at #18 with UNC.
Obligatory note that the traditional T14 wasn’t literally the T14 in the US News in any given publication. To the extent it had any sort of US News sourced definition, I think it was claimed they had all been T10 in the US News at one point or another. But it also had a basically independent sentiment behind it, hence why it was an oddball number like 14.
That is the most commonly cited reason but there are two other, more practical, reasons why the term gained popularity:
Those 14 schools were the ones whose graduates weathered the 2008 recession the best, especially in terms of employment statistics (Source)
They are also the only schools with near-guaranteed national mobility. A Florida native can go to UVA and end up in NYC BigLaw. Other T20 schools like UCLA, UT, BU and Vandy still have a huge regional bent, both in terms of where their students come from, but also the companies and states their graduates end up in.
In this case I think it is more the former, assuming the latter is a reference to US News rankings in partcular. I don’t know when people started calling them the T14 specifically, but I believe the concept of “national” law schools, law schools which placed graduates in top firms and clerkships and such across the country, was already well-established before the US News started ranking. And Texas, say, was already considered not one of those schools, despite being a generally well-regarded school.
I actually think it was US News who introduced the T10=>T14 connection. As I recall, their initial ranking in 1987 was a survey about which law schools could be considered T10 (and I don’t think the T14 were actually the T14 in 1987, not exactly). The continuous rankings that started in 1990 then eventually cemented the T14 concept, as again certain schools persisted in that range, despite variations in the exact order and periodic interlopers at the border over a variety of methodology tweaks.
But again, my sense is before any of this started, people already thought there was a small number of truly national schools, and the consensus list was the 14 schools that made up the T14.
Traditional T14 schools Georgetown and Berkeley are now outside the top 14 while Vandy, UCLA, and Wash U are in (in ties…).
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that sales were low, so USNews tweaked the formula to give us unexpected results… (I may be wrong, of course…)
US News shifted the weighting to focus on employment within 10 months of graduation (33%) and two categories of bar rate passage (first time & overall). These 3 factors amount to 58% of the weighted factors.
Over the past decade+, focus has shifted to ROI for both law degrees (JD) and MBA degrees due the escalating costs of earning either degree. When loss of earnings is combined with COA, the overall cost of obtaining either a law degree or an MBA degree can be staggering–especially if student loan debt was assumed by the student.
The cost of earning either a law degree or an MBA degree can be devastating for those graduating into a low demand job market.
When researching annual COA for top law schools, I read that for the current academic year (2025-2026) that just slightly over 20% of all law students attending ABA accredited law schools pay full tuition sticker price and almost 80% receive a discount. Discounts are typically merit based and can be conditional; some law school merit scholarships require a specified class rank be achieved in order to renew the scholarship for the subsequent academic year.
A practice called “section stacking” (essentially placing all merit scholarship recipients in the same section for their first year) assures that many will not retain their merit scholarship in years subsequent to the student’s first year in law school.
That seems counterintuitive because if half the section has to drop out because they can no longer afford to attend after losing their discounts, won’t that hurt the school’s ranking? Or is grad/retention rate not part of the USNews formula?
Graduation and retention rates are not part of the US News’ formula for ranking law schools.
I have not kept up with the worst practices of low ranked law schools which engage in the practice of section stacking, but in the past, many who lost merit scholarships tried to transfer out, but the low ranked law schools would delay issuing an official transcript so that the student missed the typical transfer deadline. My best guess is that this practice may have diminished since it received a significant amount of negative publicity.
Wait, didn’t Yale and Harvard withdraw from rankings in 2022? So did a bunch of other ones on this list. When did they decide to crawl back, or in US News ignoring the decisions?
Georgetown & Berkeley certainly tanked in the US News rankings after refusing to co-operate. But, some data are required to be reported.
US News’ law school ranking formula:
33% --employment within 10 months of graduation
18%–first time bar passage
12.5%–peer assessment
12.5%–lawyer/judge peer assessment
7%–ultimate bar passage
5%-- LSAT/GRE score
5%–student/faculty ratio
4%–undergraduate GPA
2%–library resources
1%–acceptance rate
Nearly all of the hard data used by USNews comes from ABA-required reports, all of which are public.
‘Not participating’ with USNews really just means not completing any faculty/Admin surveys, i.e., Peer Assessment. But the rules were such that you couldn’t rank yourself anyway.