Why would we limit the list to only 50 schools? Well, there are only a certain number of schools whose graduates are realistically in the running for the best jobs and clerkships. Only a certain number of schools are even arguably "national" schools. Though there is bound to be something arbitrary about any designated cutoff, we had to make a judgment call. In any event, the fact that one law school is #98 and another is #113—in any rankings system—is not a useful piece of consumer information.

The basic premise underlying the ATL approach to ranking schools: the economics of the legal job market are so out of balance that it is proper to consider some legal jobs as more equal than others. In other words, a position as an associate with a large firm is a “better” employment outcome than becoming a temp doc reviewer or even an associate with a small local firm. That might seem crassly elitist, but then again only the Biglaw associate has a plausible prospect of paying off his student loans.

In addition to placing a higher premium on “quality” (i.e., lucrative) job outcomes, we also acknowledge that “prestige” plays an out-sized role in the legal profession. We can all agree that Supreme Court clerkships and federal judgeships are among the most “prestigious” gigs to be had. Our methodology rewards schools for producing both.

Now more than ever, potential law students should prioritize their future job prospects over all other factors in deciding whether to attend law school. So the relative quality of law schools is best viewed through the prism of how they deliver on the promise of gainful legal employment. The bottom line is that we have a terrible legal job market. Of the 60,000 legal sector jobs lost in 2008-9, only 10,000 have come back. So the industry is down 50,000 jobs and there is no reason to believe they will ever reappear. If you ignore school-funded positions (5% of the total number of jobs), this market is worse than its previous low point of 1993-4. The time has come for a law school ranking that relies on nothing but employment outcomes.

Let's put it simply:

We believe that the ATL Top 50 gives prospective law students a way to analyze schools using metrics that actually matter.

When we surveyed our audience about what are the most relevant factors that potential law students should consider in selecting a school. By a large margin, these were the top choices, along with the percentage of respondents classifying them as “highly relevant”:

1. Employment data (90.3%)
2. Large firm placement (54.42%)
3. Federal clerkship placement (49.07%)
4. Tuition/Cost – (37.27%)

In other words, you prioritize employment outcomes above all else in comparing law schools. We agree. Therefore, these are the components of our rankings methodology:

How do law schools fare when assessed using this outcome-based methodology?

Rank	School	Score
1	Yale Law	85.87
2	Stanford Law	85.73
3	Harvard Law School	84.46
4	University of Chicago Law	80.34
5	University of Pennsylvania Law	79.94
6	Duke Law	75.67
7	University of Virginia Law	73.46
8	Columbia Law	71.96
9	University of California, Berkeley	71.37
10	New York University	70.85
11	Cornell Law School	68.82
12	University of Michigan	68.64
13	Northwestern Law	68.35
14	University of Texas at Austin	60.67
15	Vanderbilt Law	60.14
16	Georgetown Law	55.30
17	University of California, Los Angeles	52.42
18	University of Notre Dame Law	51.80
19	University of Georgia Law	51.52
20	University of Southern California, Gould	51.36
21	Boston College Law	51.22
22	Southern Methodist University, Dedman Law	50.76
23	Boston University Law	50.17
24	University of North Carolina Law	49.09
25	Washington University of St. Louis Law	47.83
26	University of New Mexico School of Law	46.52
27	University of Alabama Law	46.43
28	BYU - J Reuben Clark	46.40
29	Emory Law	46.36
30	Wake Forest University Law	46.28
31	George Washington Law	45.26
32	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities	45.10
33	University of Illinois Law	44.98
34	William & Mary Law	44.64
35	University of Houston Law Center	43.19
36	Seton Hall Law	42.15
37	University of Iowa Law	42.05
38	Washington and Lee Law	41.78
39	Tulane Law	41.76
40	Indiana University Maurer School of Law	41.58
41	University of Washington	41.22
42	Georgia State Law	40.33
43	Rutgers Law, Camden	40.08
44	University of Florida Levin College of Law	39.61
45	University of California, Davis	39.30
46	Ohio State University, Moritz Law	39.00
47	Saint Louis University Law	38.33
48	Fordham Law	37.02
49	University of Miami Law	36.90
50	Arizona State University, Sandra Day O'Connor	36.83

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Some further notes on methodology

Employment score (30%)

We are staying out of all of the hairsplitting about the definitions of “J.D. Advantage” versus “J.D. Preferred,” or whether employment data should be captured at 9 or 10 months after graduation. Much of the debate around law school employment data strikes us as so much fiddling around the edges of a larger problem. Thus for the employment score, we only counted full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage (excluding solos and school-funded positions).

Quality jobs score (30%)

This measures the schools’ success at placing students on career paths that best enable them to pay off their student debts. We’ve combined placement with the country’s largest and best-paying law firms (using the National Law Journal’s “NLJ 250”) and the percentage of graduates embarking on federal judicial clerkships. These clerkships typically lead to a broader and enhanced range of employment opportunities.

SCOTUS clerk & Federal judgeship scores (7.5% each)

Though obviously applicable to very different stages of legal careers, these two categories represent the pinnacles of the profession. For the purposes of these rankings, we simply looked at a school's graduates as a percentage of (1) all U.S. Supreme Court clerks (since 2008) and (2) currently sitting Article III judges. Both scores are adjusted for the size of the school.

Education cost (15%)

Solid data on individual law student educational debt is hard to come by. Published averages exist, but the crucial number, the amount of non-dischargeable government funded or guaranteed educational loan debt is not available. So as a proxy for indebtedness, we’ve scored schools based on total cost. For those schools placing a majority of their graduates into the local job market, we’ve adjusted the score for the cost of living in that market.

Alumni rating (10%)

This is the only non-public component of our rankings. Our ATL Insider Survey asks students and alumni to rate their schools in terms of academics, financial aid advising, career services advising, social life, and clinical training. For the purposes of the ATL Top 50, we only counted the alumni ratings, as that was more in keeping with our “outcomes only” approach.

We've scaled the scores by their respective weights (a perfect total score would be 100), to generate the "ATL Score."

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