The ATL 2020 Top Law School Rankings

People these days are going to law school for so many good reasons. So many new law students are there because they want to “help”: they want to serve their community, or advocate their issues, or even defend the country. The feeling that good, honorable, and ethical lawyers are necessary for a well functioning Democracy is more alive now than ever before.

Of course, good intentions plus two dollars will buy you a soda. Enrollment is up at law schools, but the cost is not coming down. Even the very best of intentions rarely survive unemployment and crushing debt.

Which law schools are putting their graduates in a position to get jobs? And which ones are leaving their students with little more than a diploma and a dream?

We welcome you to the eighth annual installment of the Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings. These are the only rankings to incorporate the latest ABA employment data concerning the class of 2019. The premise underlying our approach to ranking schools remains the same: Given the steep cost of law school and the harsh realities of the legal job market, potential students should prioritize their future employment prospects over all other factors in deciding whether and where to attend law school. The relative quality of schools is a function of how they deliver on the promise of gainful legal employment.

Our list is limited to 50 schools. We want to look at "national" schools, the ones with quality employment prospects both outside of their particular region and for graduates who don’t graduate at the top of the class.

The ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings keep an exclusive focus on the only thing that really matters: outcomes.

Enjoy the rankings, but please use them responsibly.


Largest and Most Diverse Class in a Decade at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law

Students hail from across the country; from Maine to California and Florida to Washington. The Class of 2023 comes from every corner of the United States.

Learn More


The Rankings See the 2019 rankings →

How do law schools fare when assessed using this outcomes-based methodology?

2020 Rank School 2019 Rank Change Score
1 Duke 2 1 77.21
2 U Chicago 3 1 75.99
3 U Virginia 1 -2 75.66
4 U Michigan Ann Arbor 8 4 72.94
5 U Penn (Carey) 7 2 72.2
6 Stanford 6 No change 69.92
7 Yale 10 3 69.69
8 Harvard 9 1 69.62
9 Cornell 5 -4 69.53
10 Northwestern (Pritzker) 4 -6 68.61
11 Vanderbilt 13 2 67.55
12 Columbia 11 -1 66.14
13 UC Berkeley 14 1 65.83
14 Washington University in St. Louis 15 1 65.53
15 U Texas Austin 12 -3 64.73
16 U Notre Dame 20 4 63.5
17 NYU 16 -1 62.64
18 U Georgia 19 1 61.97
19 U Illinois Urbana Champaign 25 6 61.33
20 U Iowa 21 1 60.48
21 UCLA 28 7 59.16
22 Boston College 31 9 55.9
23 Boston University 27 4 55.82
24 U Florida (Levin) 30 6 55.79
25 U Minnesota 29 4 54.96
26 Georgetown 18 -8 54.83
27 Washington and Lee University 22 -5 54.35
28 USC (Gould) 48 20 54.27
29 U Alabama 46 17 53.51
30 U Wisconsin Madison 37 7 52.66
31 U Oklahoma 44 13 51.03
32 Villanova 45 13 50.58
33 Wake Forest N/A 49.7
34 Ohio State (Moritz) 26 -8 49.18
35 Baylor N/A 49
36 U North Carolina (Chapel Hill) 17 -19 48.99
37 Temple (Beasley) 43 6 48.89
38 Southern Methodist University (Dedman) 49 11 48.77
39 U Kentucky 24 -15 48.51
40 Indiana U Bloomington (Maurer) 40 0 47.8
41 U Tennessee (Knoxville) N/A 47.7
42 William & Mary 24 -18 47.17
43 Saint Louis University N/A 46.65
44 Seton Hall 35 -9 45.6
45 Florida State 47 2 45.41
46 U Colorado (Boulder) 50 4 45.11
47 Brigham Young 33 -14 44.4
48 St. John's University N/A 44.1
49 U Nebraska (Lincoln) 36 -13 44.06
50 Emory 34 -16 43.77




Let's put it simply:



Scales tipped toward OUTPUT

What happened last year?

Class of 2019 placement graph


Methodology

We prioritize employment outcomes above all else in comparing law schools. Therefore, these are the components of our rankings methodology:

Some further notes on methodology


Quality jobs score (35%)

This measures the schools’ success at placing students on career paths that best enable them to pay off their student debts. We’ve combined placement with the country’s largest and best-paying law firms and the percentage of graduates embarking on federal judicial clerkships. These clerkships typically lead to a broader and enhanced range of employment opportunities.

Employment score (30%)

We only counted full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage (excluding solos and school-funded positions). Look, we know that there are some great non-lawyer jobs out there for which a J.D. is an “advantage.” It's not as if these jobs don't count, it's that they can't be compared in a meaningful way. The definition of "J.D. Advantage" changes from year to year and is based on a self-reported metric that defies independent third-party verification. One school's apples are another school's oranges, but we're not going to count lemons. (Early access to data courtesy of Law School Transparency.)

Education cost (15%)

Solid data on individual law student educational debt is hard to come by. Published averages exist, but the crucial number,the amount of non-dischargeable, government-funded or guaranteed educational loan debt, is not available. So as a proxy for indebtedness, we’ve scored schools based on total cost. (Data courtesy of Law School Transparency.)

Debt-per-job ratio (10%)

This is a comparison between the indebtedness of a school’s graduates to the number of actual legal jobs they obtain.

SCOTUS clerk & Federal judgeship scores (5% each)

Though obviously applicable to very different stages of legal careers, these two categories represent the pinnacles of the profession. For the purposes of these rankings, we simply looked at a school's graduates as a percentage of (1) all U.S. Supreme Court clerks (since 2013) and (2) currently sitting Article III judges. Both scores are adjusted for the size of the school. Obviously, we are aware that for the vast majority of students, Supreme Court clerkships or the federal bench are simply not prospects. But for the students who do want to be judges and academics, this outcome represents a useful separating factor for the most elite schools. Some schools put you in robes, others can't.