Legal Education in The United States - Lawyer Credentials, Prestige, and Career Path - Law School Rankings

Law School Rankings

The US News and World Report publishes the most well-known annual ranking of American programs, where Yale Law School has held the #1 spot every year since the inception of the ranking reports. A number of alternative rankings exist, such as the Leiter Reports Law School Rankings. These rankings divide law schools into "tiers" based on the overall quality of each program. A number of factors and statistics are compiled to produce these rankings each year, including academic reputation, the quality of the faculty (usually measured by the quality of its publications), the quality of the student body (usually measured by average LSAT score and undergraduate GPA), the number of volumes in the library, the earnings potential of graduates, bar passage rates, and job placement rates. Most of these measurements are acquired by voluntary self-reporting from each law program; others are compiled through a formal process of polling judges, legal professionals, recent graduates, law professors, and school administrators. The issuance of press releases that dismiss the rankings has become a yearly ritual for many law programs, but all but a handful cooperate in gathering and reporting statistics to the various ranking publications.