We are pleased to announce the release of the 14th annual Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings.
Why do people go to law school? To become lawyers, mostly. And most people also want to make a decent living at it — or at least not be saddled with debt for the rest of their working lives.
That’s why Above the Law’s law school rankings focus on the outcomes for graduates (e.g., bar passage, job placement) rather than the inputs from students (e.g., LSAT score, undergraduate GPA).
Our formula includes six components. Employment represents the bulk of a school’s score as the key element in two separately weighted criteria: legal employment (full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage) and “quality jobs” (which include positions in large, typically high-paying law firms and federal judicial clerkships). We have used the latest ABA employment data for the Class of 2025.
We also factor in first-time bar passage rate and the cost of obtaining a law degree. The final two components, collectively representing 10 percent of a school’s score, reflect the number of alumni currently serving as federal judges and the number who have clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court in the last five years. (Read more about our methodology here.)
Here are the Top 10 law schools for 2026:
- University of Chicago (+2)
- Duke (-1)
- University of Virginia (+1)
- Penn (+1)
- Yale (+3)
- Vanderbilt (+4)
- Columbia (+2)
- Cornell (-6)
- Northwestern (-3)
- University of Michigan (-3)
The University of Chicago, a perennial favorite among the top 5, is back on top for the first time since 2021. Meanwhile, Duke has slipped to second place, while UVA and Penn each moved up a notch. Yale rounds out the top five.
You’ll notice that a few other elite schools — e.g., Harvard, Stanford, NYU — don’t appear in the top 10. It’s obviously not because they aren’t great law schools. They just didn’t score as well in our ranking criteria, which focus on certain concrete data, such as job placement and cost of attendance, and leave out other less tangible qualities like selectivity and prestige.
That said, both Stanford and NYU did move up the rankings this year, thanks primarily to higher job placement scores. Stanford also reported an impressive first-time bar passage rate of nearly 100%. Conversely, slightly lower quality job scores resulted in ranking drops for Cornell and Michigan, though both remain in the top 10.
In fact, most of the ranking shifts are attributable to changes in schools’ employment and, to a lesser extent, bar passage scores. One of the benefits of our formula is that it highlights schools that may not be top of mind for everyone but have still succeeded in placing the bulk of their students in well-paying legal positions for a relatively lower cost. For example, the University of Arizona made it into the Top 50 this year, thanks to impressive bar passage and job placement rates.
We recognize that not everyone shares our perspective on what makes a top law school. For those with different priorities, visit the ATL Law School DIY, an interactive tool where you can adjust the relative weights of 11 factors yourself to customize rankings based on your personal needs and goals.
Corrections: Some of the data that originally appeared in the ATL Law School DIY was incorrect. The information was corrected on June 17, 2026. In the initial version of the 2026 ATL Top 50 rankings, the four law schools ranked No. 26 through No. 29 appeared in the wrong order. The rankings were corrected on June 16, 2026.
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