US News rankings

Illinois Law has been fined by the ABA. Is that enough to deter others who might want to cheat on the U.S. News rankings?

Dean Jim Chen is stepping down at the University of Louisville's Brandeis School of Law. What prompted the move, and what will he be doing next?

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 […]

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 […]

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a seemingly endless stream of law school rankings. For example: the best law schools overall, according to U.S. News & World Report; the best law schools for getting rich (i.e., ranked by graduates’ median compensation); the best law schools according to law firm hiring partners; and the best […]

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 […]

Santa Claus — aka Bob Morse, rankings czar at U.S. News & World Report — is letting us open our presents early (or at least before midnight). The U.S. News law school rankings were supposed to come out on Tuesday, March 15, but Morse and his colleagues at U.S. News kindly posted them sometime around […]

The U.S. News law school rankings come out tomorrow, Tuesday, March 15. In the meantime, however, U.S. News has given us a little teaser. They’ve posted the top 10 law schools, over on their website. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Ed. note: This post is written by Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist, whom we profiled. A former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney, he holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work. He blogs at The People’s Therapist. An editor at Above the Law suggested some months back that […]

We reported on the leaked U.S. News law school rankings on Tuesday afternoon. That leak was correct, and the 2011 rankings are officially up on the U.S. News website, right now. That’s bad news for NYU kids. They should try asking Berkeley students how transparent it looks to say that you go to a “top […]

We anticipated that the new U.S. News Law School Rankings would come out this week. That means we anticipated that the new rankings would be leaked beforehand. It happened last year; apparently U.S. News has more moles than Jack Bauer’s office at CTU. We reached out directly to U.S. News rankings guru Bob Morse, but […]