Yale Law School drops to No. 5 in blog's rankings
Yale University’s Sterling Law Building. Image from Shutterstock.
Corrected and updated: Harvard outranks Yale in law school rankings by Above the Law that emphasize employment after graduation.
Harvard took the top spot, while Yale fell from No. 1 to No. 5 in the rankings of the top 50 law schools released Thursday by Above the Law. The top 10 are:
• Harvard Law School
• Stanford Law School
• University of Chicago Law School
• University of Pennsylvania Law School
• Yale Law School
• University of Virginia Law School
• Duke Law School
• Columbia Law School
• Cornell University Law School
• New York University School of Law
In the law school rankings by U.S. News & World Report, Yale is No. 1, followed by Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and the University of Chicago (tied for fourth place), and New York University.
Thirty percent of the rankings score by Above the Law is based on full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage, and another 30 percent is based on placement at large, high-paying law firms and in federal judicial clerkships. The rankings are the only ones to incorporate the latest ABA employment data for the class of 2014. Above the Law also added a new metric this year that considers how much student debt is accrued by a school’s graduates for every legal job obtained.
TaxProf Blog rated the law schools that were the largest “underperformers” and “overperfomers” in the Above the Law rankings, when compared to U.S. News. The biggest underperformer was the University of Southern California, which wasn’t ranked by Above the Law but was No. 20 in U.S. News rankings. The biggest overperformer was the University of Akron, ranked as No. 50 by Above the Law and No. 127 by U.S. News.
Corrected at 8:30 a.m. to remove information that was from a 2014 Above the Law story on the rankings. Updated at 8:35 a.m. to include information from TaxProf Blog.
