I just came across the new USNWR law school rankings. I am surprised they haven’t been posted before this.
In any event, I am not advocating etc, but just posting the link.
One question: since Georgetown Law, I think, has dropped a spot to 15, will we now refer to the “top” law schools as the T-15 rather than T-14 
?
Enjoy?!
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/law-rankings
negative. The T14 (which, btw, USNews has never recognized) is the 14 schools that have been ranked in the top 10 at least once since USNews started its LS ranking. So GULC is forever part of The T14. UCLA is #14 this year, but like Texas before it, is not a member of The T14.
Comment on this list: Yale being tied (for the first time ever?) is huge for west coast bragging rights, altho not sure it will make much difference on any cross-admits.
Thanks. I wasn’t aware of how the T-14 designation originated. So does that mean the T-14 will never change?
it could grow to T15 IFF a UCLA or Vandy or Texas (the three most likely) jumps into the top 10 one year.
It is true that the term T14 is not recognized by USNWR. The term T14 is coined by the law profession and law firms to represent law schools consistently ranked in the top 14 in USNWR’s yearly law school rankings since 1987. There were no USNWR rankings in 1988 and 1989. Law school applicants (recent and current) and current law students are very familiar with the term T14. T14 represents law schools from (not in order): Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, NYU, Penn, UC Berkeley, Michigan, Duke, Virginia, Northwestern, Cornell and Georgetown. Historically, in USNWR rankings, these same 14 law schools have consistently ranked at least in the top 14 for the past 35+ years. With the exception of Georgetown (for a couple of years), these 14 schools were never ranked lower than #14. UCLA got as high as #14 in the 2024 and 2022 rankings while UT Austin got as high as #14 in 2018 and 2012 (tied with Georgetown). When UCLA and UT Austin occupied the 14th spot, Georgetown was bumped down to 15. Historically, the 14 mentioned laws schools, including Georgetown (with the mentioned exceptions), have consistently ranked in the top 14 for the past 35+ years and are considered T14 schools. Though UCLA and UT Austin were ranked #14 a couple of times over 35+ years, Georgetown has the 35+ years historical consistency (ranked not lower than #14 for 30+ years) and is still considered a T14 law school.
UCLA, UT Austin, along with Vanderbilt, USC, Washington University, St. Louis and Minnesota have consistently ranked in the top 20 for law.
All of that is true, but the differentiating factor is that all 14 of the schools have been ranked in the top 10 at least once. (It’s kinda like a top 10 with ties.)
You are correct. Initially, I thought Cornell or Georgetown was never ranked in the top 10. However, Cornell was ranked #10 several times in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2004. Georgetown was #10 only in 1993 (its best ranking), but mostly #s 14 or 13 the past 25 years. Cornell’s #10 was also its best ranking.
How did they settle on fourteen? Isn’t it more natural to have your top whatever in multiples of 5?
nobody settled on 14, it’s a byproduct of the fact that:
“…there are only (and will probably ever be) 14 schools that have ever been in the top 10 law schools in the country – making them the T-14.”
(apologies if I’m not allowed to reference another blog site on cc)
Thanks again for another good link. This really helps demystify things.
This is from Wikipedia: “There exists an informal and unofficial category known as the “Top Fourteen” or “T14”, which has historically referred to the institutions that most frequently claim the top fourteen spots in the yearly U.S. News & World Report ranking of American law schools.[6] Furthermore, many of the “T14” schools remain the only ones to have ever placed within the top ten spots in these rankings.[7] Although “T14” is not a designation used by U.S. News itself, the term is “widely known in the legal community.”[8] While these schools have seen their position within the top group shift frequently, they have mostly not placed outside of the top fourteen since the inception of the rankings, with the exception of Georgetown and UCLA, which often compete for the fourteenth spot.[9] Because of their relatively consistent placement at the top of the US News rankings, the schools that have most frequently taken the top fourteen spots are commonly referred to as the “Top Fourteen” by published books on law school admissions,[10] undergraduate university pre-law advisers,[11] professional law school consultants, and newspaper articles on the subject.[12]”
They mention UCLA which has reached #14 twice (2024 and 2022 rankings), but omitted UT Austin which also reach #14 twice (2018 and 2012). Neither of those school reached the top 10 as referred by @bluebayou. As I previously mentioned, Georgetown has always ranked in the top 14 with the exception of a couple of years when UCLA or UT Austin displaced Georgetown. In those years, Georgetown slipped to #15 or tied at #14.
This has been a very interesting thread. Thanks to all for the insight and background on rankings. I don’t have a kid pursuing law but I like learning the reasons for things such as top 14.
One other point is that a T14 law school opens the door to many job great opportunities in big law, law firms, law clerk opportunities under a judge, etc. compared to a school outside the T14. The reason is that T14 schools are well known for their quality and rigorousness throughout the country. Outside of the T14, there are many great schools, but many are known regionally.
And for anyone reading about US News Law School rankings for the first time – this year was a huge controversy, as many law schools had declined to share their data with US News for the first time, basically boycotting the rankings. Without that “private” data, US News changed its methodology significantly, roughly doubling the weight of post-grad outcomes in the calculation, halving the weight of LSAT and gpa, and removing all the factors which had previously been reported by the schools themselves, such as expenditures per student.
So while there are some fluctuations within the top schools, the biggest changes were in the T30 and lower. So no one coming to the rankings for the first time should think that something dramatic has caused a school to drop 15 places – it’s a change in the methodology. There is a big * next to this year’s ranking (and personally, I think they should be taken with a grain of salt).
I see that they completely changed the methodology this year, probably a larger change in methodology than has ever occurred before. This change is in response to all of the top 15 law schools except Chicago not submitting info to USNWR (presumably, the ones with the “1” footnote by the school name). However, they changed methodology in such a way that the usual suspects still are on top, which I expect was by design.
Discover law schools | Law School Transparency can give more specific information about employment outcomes from various law schools.
Seems like a step in the right direction. Every law school student studies the same major to the same degree goal for the purpose of qualifying for a law job, so wouldn’t post-graduation outcomes be the only rankable thing that matters – other factors that matter vary by student (e.g. cost and how much it matters, personal preference regarding location, etc.)?
Apparently, according to the Above the Law site and the USNWR site, in the new methodology used to determine the 2023/24 rankings: Employment 33% vs. previous 14%; 1st time bar passage 18% vs. previous 3% and ultimate bar passage 7% vs. none previously. These are important factors in a law career.
In an Above the Law study (ATL), I recall 9 of the top 10 law school hires in 2022 to Big Law (firms with > 250 lawyers) are mostly from the T14 schools with USC the only non T14 exception:
From ATL: Without further ado, these are the top 10 schools for getting Biglaw jobs with % from the school landing a Big Law job:
Big Law associate starting salary is at around $200K annually.
Per ATL: for Federal Clerkships, the top 10 schools are (with % from that school taking clerkship positions in 2022):
6 of the 10 are T14 schools with the other 4 schools representing regions of the US.
My point in this is: generally, T14 law schools open the doors to a lot of law career opportunities vs. attending a lower tier law school. The T14 schools have a larger reach and are well known around the US.
Agreed – the purpose of law school is to get a job which you wouldn’t qualify for without that law degree. The difficulty is that the US News methodology is still too broad and imprecise a measure of outcomes. Just being employed is what is counted, not the sort of job, whether it is the sort of job a student wanted etc. So schools with a heavy local connection but very little post-grad mobility shot up in the rankings because students are employed, whether with a small, general practice firm in a suburban community or in a county prosecutor’s office etc. If that’s what those students’ career goals were, great. But if students took on debt thinking they’d get “biglaw” or even “midlaw” from that school and didn’t, that was not a good outcome, even though that school is “highly ranked” for it’s job placement. On the other hand, schools still within say the T30 which may have a more national presence and focus, may have students waiting for the “right” specialty-type job to open up who take interim work which does not count as “full time, long term” employment for the purposes of the methodology, and are ranked “lower” even though there is more job mobility and opportunity. So now, the pressure is on law schools to make sure as many possible students count as employed, even if those students don’t want the jobs that are available to them. “Outcomes” have replaced peer and professional reputation as a the major weight in the rankings.
The new rankings could be disruptive for students who take them at face value outside the T14. For instance, Florida, Ohio State and Minnesota are all highly ranked schools (Minnesota at 16) – those schools are great if you want to practice in those states. But if a student chooses MN at #16 because it is higher ranked than BU at #27, but their goal is Boston “biglaw,” they will be surprised to realize they are stuck in the Twin Cities for their career. One hopes that students dig deeper into the rankings, and reddit is a whole world of its own with a lot of essential information for law school applicants (along with some crazy). Still, there are likely lots of applicants who still don’t appreciate the nuances of weighing debt at specific schools to achieve specific outcomes.
Disagree.
I agree with Law School Transparency: for most, the purpose of going to LS is to get a full time job that requires a JD. (not a job where a JD is an ‘advantage’)
Schools had been playing a game with graduate stats by giving LS grads a make-work ‘research job’ (at not much more than minimum wage) on campus to boost their jobs’ data.
And this was part of Yale’s contention who claimed – and rightfully so – that their on campus research job were similar to post-docs for folks desiring legal academia.
You raise a good point about regionality, MWMom. One of the things that I’ve always thought about the T14 is that they were more ‘national’ law schools in that their degree will travel pretty well and offers geographic portability, where all others are regional in nature. If you want to practice in Texas, attending UT is an excellent choice.