Law Schools

The New York Times Law School Rankings: A New Way To Rank Prestige

Could it be? A new way to judge a law school's prestige? Move over U.S. News, because The New York Times law school rankings are here.

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ranking Gold, silver and bronze sealsNow that we know prospective law students just don’t care about the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, we’re left wondering where we can turn to gauge the prestige of our country’s many, many law schools. Luckily enough, Kentucky Law professor Brian Frye — the same legal scholar who brought us the news of the downfall of U.S. News in the rankings game — has an answer for us.

What if law schools were ranked by their mentions in the paper of record, the New York Times? This seems like it could be the ultimate ranking for a generation of those inspired by influencers. Here’s Frye’s methodology:

The methodology of the NYT ranking is simple, but elegant. I created a list of 196 United States law schools by copying it from the U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools” 2024 ranking. I then searched for the official name of each law school in the New York Times archive and recorded how many times the law school had been mentioned by name in the past 12 months. I then ranked all 196 law schools according to the number of times they were mentioned by the New York Times in the last 12 months. The law school with the highest number of mentions was ranked number one, the law schools with no mentions were ranked last, and the rest of the law schools came in between.

Are you ready to behold the new way to determine law school prestige? Here are the T14 of the New York Times law school ranking:

1. Harvard Law School: 122 mentions
2. Yale Law School: 96 mentions
3. Stanford Law School: 77 mentions
4. Columbia Law School: 50 mentions
5. New York Law School: 29 mentions
6. University of Michigan Law School: 22 mentions
7. Cardozo School of Law: 15 mentions
8. Brooklyn Law School: 13 mentions
9. University of Minnesota Law School: 12 mentions
10. South Texas College of Law Houston: 11 mentions
11. University of Chicago Law School: 10 mentions
11. UCLA School of Law: 10 mentions
11. Georgetown University Law Center: 10 mentions
14. NYU School of Law: 9 mentions

Yikes! Some of the USNWR T14 didn’t earn a place in the NYT T14. Where did those schools — Duke, Penn, UVA, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and Cornell — land? Cornell came in at No. 15 with 8 mentions; Penn was at No. 24 with 4 mentions in an eight-way tie; UVA and UC Berkeley can be found in a six-way tie at No. 32 with 3 mentions each; and Duke is down at No. 59 with one mention, trapped in a 44-way tie. But what happened to Northwestern?

As noted by Dean Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog, Frye was able to identify 102 law schools that had been mentioned by the Times, and the remaining law schools (all 94 of them) without any mentions were ranked #103. (With the way the rankings stand now, it’s easy to picture U.S. News salivating over a 94-way tie.) According to Caron, those mentionless law schools included several from the U.S. News Top 50, including: Northwestern (9), USC (20), Wake Forest (25), Ohio State (26), Texas A&M (26), BYU (28), Washington & Lee (33), George Washington (41), Indiana-Maurer (42), SMU (42), Baylor (46), Kansas (46), and Villanova (48).

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Congratulations to the law schools that were influential enough to receive a mention in the New York Times.

The Gray Lady’s Guide to Legal Education [SSRN]
Frye: The New York Times Law School Rankings [TaxProf Blog]

Staci ZaretskyStaci 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 X/Twitter and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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