The 2025 U.S. News Rankings: All Hail The... T17?
And how on earth are Harvard and Cornell the #6 and #18 law schools, respectively?
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On Monday, U.S. News published its 2025 Best Law Schools rankings. There were some hiccups, as reported by Above the Law—as there sometimes have been in the past, including times when incorrect rankings were published—but it appears that we now have the final word.
This year, U.S. News left its methodology largely unchanged, so we didn’t see the huge moves that we saw in the 2023 rankings—but there were still some noteworthy shifts. For starters, the so-called “T14” schools are now the “T17,” thanks to a four-way tie for #14. (The T14 became “a thing” because for most of the rankings’ history, the same schools made up the top 14, trading spots only among themselves.)
Here are the T14/T17 (with changes from the 2024 U.S. News rankings noted parenthetically):
(1) Stanford University (-)
(1) Yale University (-)
(3) University of Chicago (-)
(4) University of Virginia (-)
(5) University of Pennsylvania (Carey) (-1)
(6) Duke University (-2)
(6) Harvard University (-2)
(8) New York University (+1)
(8) University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (+1)
(10) Columbia University (-2)
(10) Northwestern University (Pritzker) (-1)
(12) University of California—Los Angeles (+1)
(13) University of California, Berkeley (-1)
(14) Georgetown University (-)
(14) University of Texas—Austin (+2)
(14) Vanderbilt University (+5)
(14) Washington University in St. Louis (+2)
Some observations:
Congratulations to Stanford, Yale, and Chicago, which maintained their spots at the top of the heap.
Last year, there was a four-way tie for #4 between Duke, Harvard, Penn, and UVA Law. This year, UVA stayed at #4, but the other three schools dropped—by one spot to #5, for Penn, and by two spots to #6, for Duke and Harvard.
Yes, that’s right: Harvard is supposedly the nation’s #6 law school—which I believe is HLS’s all-time lowest ranking. (I’ve followed the rankings closely for the past two decades or so, ever since launching Above the Law in 2006—and for pre-2006 rankings, I consulted this compilation of U.S. News rankings from 1987 to 2010.)
If you find Harvard Law’s placement hard to believe, you’re not alone. Posters on Reddit aka “Redditors” had comments like these:
“UVA & Penn over Harvard. What are we doing here?”
“Harvard at #6 is such a joke.”
From a self-identified UVA Law student: “Harvard who? Sorry, can’t hear you down there?”
Some commentators believe that Harvard Law at #6 reflects more negatively on U.S. News than on HLS. As Dave Killoran, CEO of Powerscore Test Preparation, put it, the rankings “are so arbitrary as to have no meaning to me anymore. [Harvard Law School] at six? Columbia and NYU at eight? I don’t know what analysis can really be done at this point other than to comment that, as usual, these are wholly made up by U.S. News.”
Congratulations to UT Austin, Vanderbilt, and Washington University, the three schools not part of the traditional T14, on making it into the T14—or should that be the T17? As noted by Reuters, UT has made it into the T14 a few times before, but I believe that this year represents the T14 debut of Vandy and Wash U.
And condolences to the T14 school that fell out of that rarefied air: Cornell Law, now #18. I believe this to be the school’s all-time low; it appears that its previous low was #15, way back in the late 1980s.
Here are the schools keeping Cornell company in the top 50:
(18) Cornell University (-4)
(18) University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (+2)
(20) University of Minnesota (-4)
(20) University of Notre Dame (-)
(22) Boston University (+2)
(22) Texas A&M University (+4)
(22) University of Georgia (-2)
(25) Boston College (+3)
(26) University of Southern California (Gould) (-6)
(26) Wake Forest University (-1)
(28) Brigham Young University (Clark) (-)
(28) Ohio State University (Moritz) (-2)
(28) University of Wisconsin-Madison (+8)
(31) George Mason University (Scalia) (-3)
(31) George Washington University (+10)
(31) University of Alabama (+2)
(31) University of Utah (Quinney) (-3)
(31) William & Mary Law School (+5)
(36) University of Iowa (-)
(36) Washington and Lee University (-3)
(38) Emory University (+4)
(38) Florida State University (+10)
(38) Fordham University (-5)
(38) University of California-Irvine (+4)
(38) University of Florida (Levin) (-10)
(43) Baylor University (+3)
(43) Southern Methodist University (Dedman) (-1)
(45) Arizona State University (O’Connor) (-9)
(46) Indiana University—Bloomington (Maurer) (-4)
(46) University of Colorado-Boulder (+2)
(48) University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (-12)
(48) Villanova University (Widger) (-)
(50) Temple University (Beasley) (+4)
(50) University of California-Davis (+5)
(50) University of Connecticut (+5)
(50) University of Kansas (-4)
(50) University of Washington (-2)
Some observations:
Congratulations to the schools in the top 50 that moved up by five or more spots: Vanderbilt (+5), UW-Madison (+8), GW (+10), William & Mary Law School (+5), and FSU (+10).
And condolences to the schools in the top 50 that moved down by five or more spots: USC (-6), UF Levin (-10), ASU (-9), and the University of Illinois (-12).
There seems to be a lot of “noise” in this year’s rankings; I don’t see much in the way of patterns. Some state schools climbed by a lot, and some state schools dropped by a lot. But state or public law schools did dominate the ranks of big movers, for whatever reason: of the twelve schools in the top 50 that moved by five or more spots, nine are state schools. (Despite their names, William & Mary is a state school, and the University of Southern California is not.)
I also don’t see much in terms of geographical patterns. A midwestern school moved up by a lot (UW-Madison), and a midwestern school dropped by a lot (University of Illinois). A Florida school moved up by a lot (FSU), and a Florida school dropped by a lot (UF Levin). A California school moved up by a lot (UC Davis), and a California school dropped by a lot (USC).
I guess you could say that southern schools did well, with Vanderbilt and William & Mary both rising five spots. This is consistent with the growing popularity of southern colleges among undergraduates.
As usual, the farther down you go in the rankings, the bigger the moves in rank. The biggest gainer was the University of Maine School of Law, which climbed 32 spots to #88, while the biggest decliner was the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, which fell 27 positions to No. 125.
Not far behind Maine in the size of its gain was Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, which rose 23 places to reach #71—its highest ranking ever. In the 2024 rankings, Catholic tied for the biggest gain of any school, zooming up 28 spots—so over the past two years, it has risen an astonishing 51 spots. As I noted last year, citing a paper by Professors Brian Frye and CJ Ryan, schools with a strong ideological brand, including religiously affiliated law schools like Catholic, tend to fare well in rankings—perhaps because at least some students prefer them over similarly situated schools that lack such a brand or affiliation.
For the complete rankings of all 197 law schools, check out U.S. News. What jumps out at you as interesting? How did your alma mater fare? Please feel free to share any thoughts in the comments.
[UPDATE (3:31 p.m.): Five schools were tied for #50, and I listed only Temple. I have now added the schools that were originally omitted and made conforming edits to the discussion. I apologize for the error.]
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Some people turn down full scholarship at UVA and Penn (and many people turn down partial scholarships) to pay full freight at Harvard. These rankings are obviously ridiculous. There needs to be some revealed preference component.
The question begs the question of how the rankings are (and were) calculated. Hark back to the first set of rankings. Assume US News came up with a formula and then ran it as a test on the data from the law schools before it published. If Harvard and Yale weren't 1 and 2, US News would have changed its formula. (As it has several times, mid-stream, over the last 5 years.). My point is that they and we assume that the schools whose reputations permit them to get the most high LSAT-achieving students are the best students. Or maybe we assume that the schools are most like the ones are grandfathers thought the best are the best. Or maybe those two things and US News combine to lock in our perceptions. And then imagine that US News begins to value other things in its rankings. It all starts to shift. And that means that when we ask "And how on earth are Harvard and Cornell the #6 and #18 law schools, respectively?," what we're really saying is that we know Harvard's the first or second best school in the country because what our grandfathers' thought or what the LSAT median and the acceptance ratio tell us is what we think measures the best. And, exactly what would Harvard be the best at? The answer to that question might be very different whether you are asking what it's best at attracting (student achievements, faculty scholarship) or what it's the best at producing. If you start asking what schools are the best at producing (which school produces the best Supreme Court clerks, the best big law partners, the best state court judges, the best district attorneys, the best immigration lawyers, the best small business counselors, the best family law practitioners, the best special ed advocates, the best real estate attorneys), you. might be on your way to a ranking that matters.