U.S. News rankings

Last week, we received our 4,000th response to the ATL School & Firm Insider Survey. We thought it would be interesting to compare how the vaunted T14 stack up based on our own survey feedback. Let's look at how the elite schools compare....

The U.S. News Law School Rankings are out, which means it's open season on law school deans. While deans from schools that dropped are trying to save themselves, deans from schools that went up in the rankings are crowing from the rooftops.

The latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings are out - and there's a surprising amount of movement among the top schools. Who are this year's winners and losers?

It's hard to believe that another year has passed, but here we are. The weather is turning cold, the Republican presidential contest is heating up, and it's time to review this year's biggest stories on Above the Law. We'll refrain from offering our subjective judgments on the most important stories of the year. Instead, we'll identify the ten biggest stories of the past year as decided by you, our readers....

[A] law school could literally burn a huge sum of money and, as long as the flames were meant to teach something to the students — the craziness of the U.S. News algorithm, perhaps? — the school would benefit in the rankings. — New York Times journalist David Segal, responding to a reader’s question in […]

Lawrence Sager, dean of the University of Texas School of Law, will be stepping down at the end of the 2011-2012 academic year. He managed to get Texas into the top 14 of the U.S. News law school rankings, but all good things must come to an end. Why is Larry Sager relinquishing the UT Law deanship?

All right folks, graduation is upon us. If you are a 3L who did not secure a post-graduate legal job, I’m sorry. Your life isn’t over, but law school didn’t work out as well for you as you might have hoped. At least not yet. Not that your law schools want anybody to know that. […]

On Monday, we talked about the big New York Times article over the weekend about the way law schools use merit-based scholarships to rope students in. When discussing the need to give out scholarships, the Times cites some very familiar language about how fixation on the U.S. News rankings guides the decisionmaking processes of many […]

Many people, especially law school administrators, bemoan the U.S. News law school rankings. Sure, they have their pedagogical reasons for hating the rankings, but there are larger issues here. When schools drop in the rankings, heads tend to roll. Of course, law schools deans rarely admit they were ousted because of the U.S. News. But […]

I graduated from Northwestern Law in 2009. It is now 2011, my loans are coming due (real due — not the fake, put ‘em in forebearance, due of yesteryear), and I am currently “employed” doing two things: reviewing documents at an embarrassing hourly wage on projects that start and stop without any sort of consistency, […]

Now is the season when law school applicants, having received their admission and rejection letters, need to make up their minds about where to attend law school (or if they want to go at all). We’ve received a number of inquiries from anxious 0Ls seeking advice about whether to matriculate at School X or School […]

Welcome Texas! As you are all know, the University of Texas School of Law has moved into the “top 14” in this year’s U.S. News law school rankings. It’s a bit of cheat for U.S. News: Texas is technically tied for 14th, which means that the magazine has actually managed to cram 15 schools into […]

Yesterday we talked about a couple of schools that fell in this year’s U.S. News law school rankings, whose deans promptly devoted school-wide emails making excuses for their programs dropping. Predictably, they criticized U.S. News’s latest methodology, even though this year’s formula did a better job of focusing on factors law students actually care about […]

We’ve already noted that there was no change at the very top of the 2012 U.S. News Law School Rankings. The best schools remain the best schools. Further down the list, we start to see some volatility. Now, every year there needs to be some change in the rankings; how else is U.S. News going […]

Drums please. The U.S. News law school rankings for 2012 are here, y’all. Time to pay tribute to that which is more important to legal educators in this country than anything else. As is customary here at Above the Law, we will be posting a series of open threads, running through at least the top […]