Both institutions maintained their joint first-place position
In the latest release of U.S. News & World Report's Best Law Schools rankings, Yale and Stanford universities dominated as the top law schools in the United States.
Yale and Stanford maintained their joint first-place position. The University of Chicago Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School also retain their rankings from the previous year, maintaining their respective third and fourth positions.
The University of Virginia School of Law climbed four spots to tie with Harvard Law School and Penn for fourth place. New York University School of Law faced a decline, falling four positions to tie with Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and the University of Michigan Law School for ninth place.
The latest U.S. News & World Report's Best Law Schools rankings aim to guide prospective students with more detailed insights into law schools that successfully place graduates into the workforce. These rankings considered graduates' employment outcomes and bar passage rates, factors that account for nearly 60 percent of the evaluation criteria. The remaining portion of the ranking formula considered academic metrics, faculty resources, achievements of entering students, and quality assessments from peers within the law education sector and practicing legal professionals.
The methodology for the rankings remained consistent with the previous year, focusing on standardized scoring across ten distinct factors. Each school's score was then weighted, totalled, and scaled, allowing for a comparative format where the highest-scoring institution sets the benchmark.
One methodological shift in this year's rankings is averaging bar passage and employment data over two years instead of one, aiming to reduce fluctuations and provide a more stable view of outcomes.
For the rankings, U.S. News surveyed nearly 200 American Bar Association-accredited law schools in the fall of 2023 and early 2024, with 144 responding. The data collected, required annually by the American Bar Association, includes detailed statistics on graduate employment and bar passage, among other academic indicators.
