Once upon a time, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings served a purpose. Not a particularly noble purpose, mind you, but a functional one. Instead of nurturing its reputation as a magazine chronicling “U.S. News” or giving a “World Report,” it would churn out annual school rankings. The line between the 99th and 100th best Drama degree programs was a mostly vacuous distinction, but it gave prospective students something to guide genuinely life-altering decisions other than brochures put together by school marketers. In a significant if imperfect way, USNWR democratized insider knowledge by distilling institutional gravity into a crude but legible hierarchy.
For all the nonsense fueling the law school rankings, U.S. News provided useful, broad guidance. As a marker of prestige and future portability of a degree, was Yale really better than Harvard? Maybe, maybe not. But the “HYS” schools — in whatever order — were roughly better for prospective students than the “CCN” schools, which were in turn roughly better than the rest of the top 14, which we all decided would be better than the next tier.
We won’t know precisely how USNWR ranks the schools until the Spring, but Professor Derek Muller has released his updated projections for the 2026-2027 U.S. News law school rankings, and we’ve entered the full clown-car phase of this exercise.
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Yale and Harvard are tied… with Duke. At 5.
Nothing against our friends at UVA, but if you’re going there over Yale you’ve messed up.
There are ranking philosophies that rightly put UVA higher. For instance the Above the Law rankings, which are designed for the express purpose of putting the thumb on the scale of best outcomes for the price. But that’s not what USNWR has ever stood for and not what anyone picking up that list expects it to reflect. USNWR markets its list to prospective students as a barometer of prestige and — if these rankings bear out — this ain’t it.
Muller used publicly disclosed information, which gave him roughly 75 percent of the data used in USNWR’s current — as of last year, anyway — methodology, He notes that the latest USNWR methodology increases compression and volatility so the final results could swing a bit from his projections, but if the final results come out wildly different, it will seem like the publication intervened to tweak the system and at that point… what good are rankings anyway?
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The boycott — and the changes made to deal with it — really screwed all this up. Yale decided in a huff to stop cooperating with USNWR on its rankings, bringing a number of schools along for the ride. Schools couched the boycott as a matter of respecting public interest work and standing up for financial aid, which sounds great until you scratched the surface. But most of all, cutting off access to critical data prevented U.S. News from doing the one thing U.S. News did well: democratizing insider knowledge.
The schools wanted out of the rankings game. U.S. News adapted in ways that made the rankings less meaningful. Prospective students now have to do more independent research to understand what different schools actually offer. Perhaps that’s the outcome the boycotting deans wanted all along. Or perhaps they just didn’t think this through.
Let’s go with the latter.
Rankings never captured the whole picture. Do you want to live in New Haven or Palo Alto? Does the school have strong clinics in your area of interest? Can you afford it? These are better questions than “but which one is technically ahead of the other this year?” That said, the complete breakdown of U.S. News as a useful signal for top schools creates real problems. A first-generation college student researching law schools benefits from an external source validating which schools open which doors. With Yale projected at #5, that student might reasonably wonder if Yale’s placement power has actually declined (it hasn’t) or if they’re looking at garbage out (they are).
This couldn’t come at a worse time for students. U.S. News deserved the criticism it took over the years for overprivileging inputs like undergrad GPAs and LSAT scores over outputs, but right now those inputs carry more importance than ever. Now that Biglaw has accelerated its recruiting process to extend summer associate offers before students have even received their first semester grades, whole careers are getting decided on vibes. If employers are making hiring decisions with no regard to the actual learning the law part, it means they’re making hiring decisions based on the school’s admissions.
It is a very stupid way to hire lawyers, but it’s the way we’re doing it. And a reliable ranking of perceived prestige would come in handy right about now.
Because those elite Biglaw recruiters are not thinking “let’s lower our hiring target for Harvard.”
Joe Patrice is a senior 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 or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.