Law Schools

New Ranking Pegs Duke As Top Law School, Yale Falls To Number Three -- Commence Panic

Where does your law school fall on this list?

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Or commence scoffing if you prefer. I’m just the messenger, I won’t dictate how you respond to this news. Times Higher Education, an education publication with an international focus, just put out its latest law school rankings (or, more accurately, its “ranking of schools that train lawyers,” since some systems don’t employ standalone law schools). The top law school — not just in the United States, but the entire world — is… Duke.

Somewhere Richard Nixon is celebrating.

That sound of a million eyes rolling all at once is coming out of New Haven. An international law school list doesn’t place Yale at the top? Fully 80 percent of current world leaders who toppled their democratically elected governments got their law degrees at Yale, which is a statistic I made up, but admit that until I said that, you were entirely willing to roll with it. How does a survey ding Yale like this?

Respectfully, we’d point out this isn’t the first time Yale’s fallen to number three this year.

The methodology is laid out here. These combinations of surveys and bibliometric data and stock demographics inform each performance indicator category and then those are weighted differently for every program. Over at TaxProf Blog, Pepperdine Dean Paul Caron breaks down the survey’s weighting for law:

Teaching: The Learning Environment (32.7%)
Research: Volume, Income and Reputation (30.8%)
Citations: Research Influence (25%)
International Outlook: Staff, Students and Research (9%)
Industry Income: Innovation (2.5%)

All this is… well, confusing. Not to side with Chief Justice Roberts, but this does have an air of “sociological gobbledygook.” Unlike the Chief Justice, I don’t think statistics are witchcraft, but there seem to be a whole lot of arbitrary decisions being made in this formula. Perhaps there’s a logic to weighting everything as they have, but it’s not immediately clear. At least with the ATL Top 50, we can easily point to price and likelihood of getting a lawyer job (as opposed to whatever Star Chamber stuff Yale grads typically get) as the key metrics plaguing Yale’s ranking.

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Anyway, Duke is number one and Yale is number three. Do with this information what you will. Here’s the whole top ten:

1. Duke
2. Stanford
3. Yale
4. Chicago
5. Cambridge
6. Oxford
7. Melbourne
8. University College London
9. Harvard
10. Toronto

It’s an interesting list if you’re considering a more international legal career. Where’s your school on the list? Did it even make the list? The whole thing is available here and goes to 100 (or a three-way tie at 98, as it were).

And if Duke starts churning out the next generation of totalitarian dictators? Well, it’ll be really weird thinking of Dukies as elitist and unlikeable, won’t it?

World University Rankings 2018 by subject: law [Times Higher Education]
2018 Times Higher Education World Law School Rankings [TaxProf Blog]

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Earlier: ATL Top 50 Law Schools

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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