After months of drama complete with law school boycotts and indefinite delays, the 2024 U.S. News law school rankings were released in May. They were generally received, not with the usual ravenous fanfare, but with morbid curiosity given the changes made to the publication’s rankings methodology. But what about the U.S. News specialty rankings? Those haven’t received quite as much attention — until now.
Dean Paul Caron of Pepperdine Law has created an omnibus ranking of the top 100 law schools for the 13 specialty programs U.S. News compiles rankings for each year. Those 13 programs are, in alphabetical order, Business/Corporate Law; Clinical Law; Constitutional Law; Contracts/Commercial Law; Criminal Law; Dispute Resolution; Environmental Law; Health Care Law; Intellectual Property Law; International Law; Legal Writing; Tax Law; and Trial Advocacy.
Which law school came out on top?
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Here are the Top 10 law schools in the omnibus specialty ranking:
- Georgetown University
- Harvard University
- Northwestern University
- University of Michigan
- Stanford University
- UC Berkeley
- UCLA
- New York University
- Duke University
- University of Virginia
Click here to see the full list of the Top 100.
Congrats to Georgetown Law! The school may have been booted out of the T14 (it now ranks at 15), but it’s #1 when it comes to legal specialties.
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And where’s Yale? As noted by the ABA Journal, the elite school comes in at No. 16. We suppose that’s what you get for boycotting U.S. News.
2024 U.S. News Omnibus Specialty Rankings [TaxProf Blog]
These law schools did best in blog’s ‘omnibus specialty rankings’ based on US News data [ABA Journal]
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.