A recent study by two law professors, Brian Frye (University of Kentucky) and C.J. Ryan (Indiana University) found that the U.S. News and World Report’s Law School rankings have become increasingly irrelevant for prospective law students.
The study examined the relationship between changes in a school’s U.S. News ranking and the academic credentials of the next year’s incoming class. An increase in ranking should bring in more highly qualified applicants and lead to a stronger incoming class. However, using a decade’s worth of data, the study found, at best, a weak positive relationship between rankings and student decision-making and, more often, a negative relationship between the two. In other words: the rankings have outlived their usefulness as a driver of applicant behavior.
Frye hypothesized that prospective students use the rankings predominantly as a gauge of prestige and published a second paper introducing a replacement. He used only one metric to build his law school prestige ranking: mentions in the New York Times. His team calculated the number of mentions each school received in the NYT between May 2023 and 2024. Mentions could be positive or negative (all publicity is good publicity), and he deemed concerns such as regional bias and naming conventions “illusory” because, well, in his words: “prestige is a scarce good, reserved to those who deserve it.”
In the ranking, Harvard Law captured the top spot followed by Yale and Stanford Law Schools. While the top schools don’t veer far from the U.S. News, there are other, less expected entrants to the T14. Check below for the top schools and you can find the full list of all 196 schools here (although, note that all schools with zero mentions are tied at rank 103).
NYT Rank (# Mentions) Law School Name US News Rank
1 (122) Harvard Law School 4
2 (96) Yale Law School 1
3 (77) Stanford Law School 1
4 (50) Columbia Law School 8
5 (29) New York Law School 127
6 (22) Univ of Michigan Law School 9
7 (15) Cardozo School of Law 61
8 (13) Brooklyn Law School 114
9 (12) Univ of Minnesota Law School 16
10 (11) S. Texas College of Law Houston 150
11 (10) Univ of Chicago Law School 3
11 (10) UCLA School of Law 13
11 (10) Georgetown Univ Law Center 14
14 (9) NYU School of Law 9