The Best Law Schools For Tax Law (2020)
A ranking for what may be considered one of the most prestigious and sophisticated practice areas.
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.)
Today, we’re looking at the rankings for what may be considered one of the most prestigious and sophisticated practice areas: tax law. If you want to take a number of tax courses as a J.D. student or are interested in pursuing an LL.M. in tax, this is the ranking for you. TaxProf Blog has the new methodology for the specialty rankings:
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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. [The response rate of the tax faculty survey was 50%.].
Without further ado, here are the top law schools in the specialty of tax:
Rank | Score | School |
1 | 4.9 | NYU |
2 | 4.5 | Georgetown |
3 | 4.4 | Florida |
4 | 4.2 | Northwestern |
5 | 4.1 | Virginia |
6 | 4.0 | Columbia |
6 | 4.0 | Stanford |
8 | 3.9 | Harvard |
8 | 3.9 | UC-Irvine |
8 | 3.9 | UCLA |
For the full ranking, check out U.S. News, where you’ll see how 175 law schools fared.
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Best Tax Law Programs [U.S. News]
2020 U.S. News Tax 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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