Northwestern enters top 10 in latest US News law school rankings; Harvard drops to No. 3
Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law has entered the top 10 in law school rankings released on Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report.
Yale Law School remained No. 1 on the list. Three schools in the top 10 had drops in the rankings. Harvard Law School dropped to No. 3 after tying for No. 2 with Stanford for the last four years. The University of California at Berkeley dropped to No. 12 from No. 8 last year. And Columbia University dropped to No. 5 after tying with the University of Chicago for the No. 4 spot last year.
The rankings are here and a report by Law.com (sub. req.) is here.
University of California at Berkeley interim law dean Melissa Murray tells Law.com she believes the drop is an anomaly caused in part by small declines in areas such as the school’s employment rate and peer assessment figure. She notes that the school was “in the news for all the wrong reasons for much of the past year” because of sexual harassment allegations against former dean Sujit Choudhry, though there was no material effect on the academic program.
The top 20 are:
1) Yale University
2) Stanford University
3) Harvard University
4) University of Chicago
5) Columbia University
6) New York University
7) University of Pennsylvania
8) University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and University of Virginia (tie)
10) Duke University and Northwestern University (tie)
12) University of California at Berkeley
13) Cornell University
14) University of Texas at Austin
15) Georgetown University and University of California at Los Angeles (tie)
17) Vanderbilt University
18) Washington University in St. Louis
19) University of Southern California
20) University of Iowa and University of Notre Dame (tie)
The U.S. News rankings are based on peer assessments by legal academics, lawyers and judges; median LSAT and GRE scores; median undergraduate grade point averages; acceptance rate; bar pass rate; placement success; and faculty resources.
