Yale Law School has fallen from the top spot in the latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, ending a 36-year run as number one.
Stanford Law School is now ranked first, after having shared that ranking with Yale last year. Yale is tied for second place with the University of Chicago Law School.
The shift was apparently driven by a small change in outcomes. Yale’s employment rate declined slightly, with 94.9% of graduates in long-term, full-time legal or law-related jobs within ten months of graduation, down from 95.5% the prior year. With a rankings methodology that places weight on employment and bar passage data reported to the American Bar Association (ABA), even marginal movement can change rankings at the top.
Top 30 Best Law Schools:
#1. Stanford University #2. University of Chicago #2. Yale University #4. University of Pennsylvania #4. University of Virginia #6. Harvard University #7. Duke University #7. New York University #9. Columbia University #9. Northwestern University #9. University of Michigan Ann-Arbor #12. Vanderbilt University #13. Cornell University #13. UCLA #13. Washington University in St Louis #16. UC Berkeley #16. UT at Austin #18. Georgetown University #18. UNC Chapel Hill #20. Boston College #20. University of Notre Dame #22. Texas A&M University #22. University of Minnesota #24. Boston University #24. Brigham Young University #26. George Washington University #26. University of Georgia #26. University of Southern California #26. University of Wisconsin - Madison #30. Ohio State University #30. Wake Forest University
Interesting that the top 3 law schools, Stanford, Yale, & U Chicago, also have the smallest enrollment among the top 20 law schools.
NYU & Columbia law schools have slipped to number 7 & to number 9 respectively, but almost certainly will continue to be regarded as among the top 6 law schools by the legal community for recruiting & hiring purposes (Biglaw & Federal Judicial clerkships).
P.S. The largest class of full-time JD (law) students is at Harvard, although Georgetown Law Center has more law students when part-time JD students are included. (Harvard only has full-time JD students.)
IMHO there are some meaningful metrics in thinking about law school.
Bar passage rate. There are schools with dismal bar passage rates and that’s a huge red flag.
% new grads employed in a job which requires a JD. Many law schools have been accused of manipulating their employment numbers by hiring their OWN grads to work in alumni relations, fundraising, etc. (jobs which don’t require a JD and are not actually “legal jobs” even if they are for a law school). Huge red flag for low employment rates.
Per capita rates of federal clerkships and the other “very very very high end” legal jobs.
The rest is noise. Nobody cares whether Columbia is up or down three spots or Penn is dropping. It’s the bottom of the second tier and the entire third tier where metrics matter. Families are spending gobs of money for what, in some cases, is a marginal legal education. The irony is that the top law schools do NOT prepare their students for the bar exam. They give them a rigorous legal education, and then the students teach themselves and review either in a class or on their own, the specific material needed to pass the bar in whichever jurisdiction they are going to practice in. The “bottom of the barrel” schools teach more to the test- so a low bar passage rate is specifically troubling.
Agree with your criteria. The slight movements within the top 15-20 do not signify much of anything in terms of career outcomes for students. It is important to look at employment and bar passage stats as you recommend. And, specifically, it’s helpful to consider certain types of employment - like BigLaw, government, judicial clerkships- depending on what matters to the applicant. There are specifically some pretty big differences in clerkship outcomes in the top schools.
About ten years ago, the ABA began implementing a strict auditing procedure that has largely eliminated this, as well as other abuses. But prior to that time, some schools engaged in some pretty shady practices to inflate their employment numbers.