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For decades, the law school rankings world was dominated by U.S. News—but many claim that their relevance is on the decline. Ever since the U.S. News law school rankings boycott and resulting methodology changes, there has been noticeably greater instability in the rankings, and the relevance of traditional designations such as “T6,” “T20,” and “T30” is more dubious than ever. See, for example, this well-articulated article by Duke Law Professor Stuart Benjamin on the outdated notion of the “T14.”
Alternative Law School Rankings
Spivey Consulting has long been in favor of more diffuse rankings and tier-based rankings, and after this year’s shake-ups, there seems to be even more of an appetite for U.S. News alternatives. One example is the law school rankings from LSD.Law, an applicant-created application tracking platform and data repository, which has gained some traction among applicants by ranking schools using an original metric from their own data: where applicants choose to enroll relative to competitors. (Prominent Stanford Law professor Orin Kerr, soon to be a guest on our podcast, has spoken positively about this idea.)
Lawyer & Judge Assessment Scores
Another idea for ranking law schools—and the one we’ll be focusing on today—came from a user on the r/LawSchoolAdmissions subreddit, who proposed grouping schools into tiers based on their U.S. News Lawyer & Judge Assessment Score. U.S. News, with its post-boycott methodology, primarily relies on publicly available data from the ABA, but this is one of two original metrics that it contributes: the Peer Assessment Score (based on ratings from legal academics and deans) and the Lawyer & Judge Assessment Score (ratings from practicing attorneys and judges).
Both of these reputational metrics have some value, but for the purposes of this blog, we’ll be looking at the Lawyer & Judge metric, which reflects how law schools’ reputations are viewed by the people whose perspectives count, for many applicants, most of all: future employers.
The grouping proposed by Reddit user u/T20_puddlejumper (irony!) is based on three brackets of reputational scores: those rated an average of 4.5+ out of 5, those rated 4.0-4.4, and those rated 3.5-3.9 (with 37 total schools falling within these groupings). We’re including the tiers from that post below, with data from Law School Labs.
Like any set of rankings—even custom rankings you make yourself on My Rank—we certainly don’t think anyone should decide where to go to law school based purely on this list. But it is, in our view, one of the only interesting things that can still be gleaned from the U.S. News rankings. We hope you find it interesting, too!
Law Schools Ranked by 2026 U.S. News Lawyer & Judge Assessment Scores
You can read more about how U.S. News collects and aggregates its assessment score data here.
Thank you again to u/T20_puddlejumper!
