The 2024-2025 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have been unveiled, revealing alarming errors and causing considerable turmoil amongst law professionals.
In a preliminary release, a startling 80 schools, including some in the top 50, were misranked. Corrections were made, prompting universities to boycott the rankings as these reputed establishments were misrepresented as willingly participating, when they had merely provided publicly available data for the new rankings.
The top law schools as ranked by the U.S. News & World Report are presented below, with changes in ranking from the previous year as reported by Mike Spivey of Spivey Consulting.
The methodology used for the latest edition of these rankings, which evoked both lofty gains and serious losses, can be summarized as follows:
- Employment – 33%
- First-Time Bar Passage – 18%
- Ultimate Bar Passage – 7%
- Peer Assessment – 12.5%
- Lawyer/Judge Assessment – 12.5%
- LSAT/GRE – 5%
- UGPA – 4%
- Acceptance Rate – 1%
- Student-Faculty Ratio – 5%
- Library Resources – 2%
The top 14 law schools, known as the T14, have had some shifts with UVA ascending to #4 and NYU falling a few spots. Stand-up is Stanford at #1, followed by Yale, University of Chicago, Duke, and Harvard rounding out the top five.
Expanding to schools 16-28, the University of Notre Dame had the most notable leap, rising seven places and landing in the Top 20, whereas Brigham Young and the University of Florida experienced a six-place drop.
The rest of the law schools in the Top 48 saw impressive movement as well. The biggest winners here were William & Mary (+9), Florida State (+8), Colorado (+8), Illinois (+7), and Washington & Lee (+7). The biggest losers here were Emory (-7) and UC Irvine (-7).
For a fully outlined list of the 2024-2025 U.S. News Law School Rankings, please visit the official Above the Law page.