The Best Law Schools For Environmental Law (2020)
A ranking for a practice area that will become increasingly important as the impacts of global climate change affect the world around us.
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As we’ve mentioned time and time again here at Above the Law, there are lots of factors that go into deciding what your perfect law school is. While net cost and job outcomes likely will — and should — dominate any decision calculus, there are still other things to look at when making your final determination.
If you’re lucky enough to know the exact practice area you’re interested in post-graduation, then you probably want to take a look at the latest U.S. News Specialty Rankings. (Though it should be noted what specialty you want to practice as an attorney may vastly differ from the ideas you have before you enter law school.)
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Today, we’re looking at the rankings for a practice area that will become increasingly important as the impacts of global climate change affect the world around us: environmental law. TaxProf Blog has the new methodology for the specialty rankings:
Law school specialty rankings … are based solely on peer assessments by law school faculty who teach in that specialty area. …
[L]aw school faculty members who teach in each specialty area rated the other law schools in that specialty area on a 5-point scale. Those schools with the highest average scores among those raters who rated them appear in the rankings and are ranked in descending order based on their average peer score they received in that specialty area. … This new methodology produced a significantly larger number of schools that were ranked in each specialty area – in some cases five or six times more. … [A]ll programs that received 10 or more ratings are numerically ranked in that specialty. Schools with less than 10 ratings in a specialty aren’t listed.
Without further ado, here are the top schools in the specialty of environmental law:
| Rank | Score | School |
| 1 | 4.5 | Lewis & Clark |
| 1 | 4.5 | Pace |
| 3 | 4.4 | UC-Berkeley |
| 4 | 4.3 | UCLA |
| 4 | 4.3 | Vermont |
| 6 | 4.1 | Columbia |
| 6 | 4.1 | Harvard |
| 8 | 4.0 | Colorado |
| 8 | 4.0 | Georgetown |
| 8 | 4.0 | NYU |
| 8 | 4.0 | Oregon |
| 8 | 4.0 | Utah |
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For the full ranking, check out U.S. News, where you’ll see how 183 law schools fared.
Best Environmental Law Programs [U.S. News]
2020 U.S. News Environmental Law Rankings [TaxProf Blog]
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
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