Yesterday, U.S. News published its 2024 Best Law School rankings. For the 2023 rankings, the magazine radically overhauled its methodology, leading to a lot of movement. For the 2024 rankings, it largely adhered to last year’s approach, which explains why there was more stability this time around.
A school’s ranking is now based on the following components, weighted as follows (with a few minor adjustments from 2023, per Staci Zaretsky at Above the Law):
- Employment: 33% (newly averaged between the two most recent graduating class years)
- First-Time Bar Passage: 18% (newly averaged between the two most recent graduating class years)
- Ultimate Bar Passage: 7% (newly averaged between the two most recent graduating class years)
- Peer Assessment: 12.5% (slightly tweaked)
- Lawyer/Judge Assessment: 12.5% (slightly tweaked)
- LSAT/GRE: 5%
- UGPA: 4%
- Acceptance Rate: 1%
- Student-Faculty Ratio: 5%
- Library Resources: 2%
Averaging employment and bar-passage stats between the two most recent class years makes sense to me, as a way of reducing the influence of a single aberrant class. It will also tend to reduce variability over the years, which again probably offers a more accurate picture of how law schools fare in terms of finding jobs for their graduates and helping them pass the bar.
Now, on to the rankings. Here are the top 14 aka “T14” law schools—or actually the top 15, because of a two-way tie for #14—with changes from last year noted parenthetically: