Despite Boycott, Yale Still Tops U.S. News Best Law School Rankings

Despite leading a much-publicized boycott against the U.S. News & World Report’s law school rankings last year, Yale Law School is still ranked first in a preview of the rankings the publication released on Tuesday.

Yale tied with Stanford Law School for the top spot. The University of Chicago was ranked third, and Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania law schools tied for fourth.

Rounding out the rest of the top 14 in order were: Duke University and New York University (tied for 6th), Columbia University and the University of Virginia (tied for 8th), Northwestern University, University California, Berkeley and University of Michigan (tied for 10th), Cornell University (13), and UCLA (14). U.S. News said it would release its complete law school rankings next week.

In the wake of sharp public criticism and a boycott by several of the country’s leading law schools law fall, U. S. News and World Report said it would revise the methodology it uses to rank law schools in the future.

According to a letter to law school deans posted in January, Robert Morse, U.S. News’ Chief Data Strategist, and Stephanie Salmon, its Senior Vice President for Data & Information Strategy, wrote that the publication would make several changes in its methodology for the next rankings – the 2023–2024 Best Law Schools.

That was a significant concession by U.S. News to concerns expressed by the law deans at such prominent universities as Yale, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, Columbia, University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley, all of whom said that they would no longer participate in the rankings because they were flawed and did not represent the values of legal education they wanted to instill in students.

On Tuesday, U.S. News said the changes to it 2023-2024 Best Law Schools methodology included:

• A significant increase in the weight of the bar passage rate, and the inclusion of a two-year measurement of a graduating class’s bar exam success
• A significant increase in weight of employment 10 months after graduation
• Full credit for all full-time, long-term fellowships — includes those that are school funded — where bar passage is required or where the JD is an advantage
• Maximum credit for graduates in graduate studies in the ABA employment outcomes grid
• A significant reduction in overall weight given to reputation surveys
• Peer assessment and industry assessment are weighted equally to ensure opinions of academics were not weighted higher than those of practicing lawyers and judges
• A reduction in weights for median LSAT/GRE and median GPA scores.

It did not reveal the precise quantitative changes associated with those revisions, promising more details when the full rankings are published next week.

Explaining how it handled the law schools that did not provide their institution’s statistical data, U.S. News wrote, “In an effort to provide students with a level playing field for comparison, U.S. News ranked law schools using metrics that are mandatory for disclosure by the American Bar Association. This means that certain factors such as expenditures, at-graduation employment rate and JD graduate indebtedness are no longer included in the formula. However, the U.S. News’ law school profile pages will continue to incorporate data that law schools reported directly to U.S. News over the past two years, including indicators not used in the ordinal rankings and other critical information such as program offerings, financial aid availability and graduate salaries.”

In the end, the changes did little to change the overall rankings for this year compared to last. There was some reshuffling of the order, and Georgetown University dropped out of the top 14, while UCLA moved up to 14th.

Heather Gerken, dean of the Yale Law School, was not impressed, saying in a statement quoted by the New York Times, “Yale Law School has never paid attention to the U.S. News & World Report rankings, and after everything we have seen over the last year it has only cemented our decision to walk away.”