Updated projected 2026-2027 USNWR law school rankings (to be released April 2026 or so)
Some volatility, and some stability, as most of the data is in
The updated 509 data from the American Bar Association discloses a good deal of public information about law school admissions and law school faculty that is ultimately used in the USNWR law school rankings. We now have about 75% of the information that USNWR uses in its rankings. And we can do a pretty good job estimating it, subject to some methodological quirks that are hard to replicate (e.g., the employment metric formula is not publicly disclosed), and subject to the survey data that won’t be revealed until the spring (but that is notoriously sticky). It’s also possible USNWR modifies its methodology, of course.
But I took the opportunity to update my projections from last spring now that we have even more data. I tried to add precision from, so that can explain some changes; otherwise, changes to LSAT or UGPA medians, student-faculty or student-librarian ratios, or admissions rate may have moved schools around slightly. Some other schools (including Duke and George Mason with respect to faculty disclosures, as of this writing) have gaps in their 509 disclosures that may be updated later, so I have to use older data to supplement.
And one more note, the new methodology means more compression and volatility, so proceed with caution! Note: tied schools are not listed alphabetically, but by raw score—so that means there’s a higher likelihood that in a tier of tied schools that the top one could move up or the bottom one could move down depending on methodology tweaks or data errors. Some schools moved from my May 2025 projections because the changes in admissions data and the like were enough to bump them up or down some spots—a further reason for hesitation before jumping to conclusions. (And of course, it might be that a school saw no material deterioration in these metrics, only that other nearby schools improved at a faster clip.)
Here are the early, now updated projections.
UPDATE: I accidentally used the wrong data for the last two columns, pulling it from a previous year—that’s been corrected! The Dec. 2025 data is unchanged.
Of some note is that there is less volatility than in previous years. As the two-year average of scores settles in for a second consecutive year, and as some of the jostling around the change in methodology settles down, we should expect some more stability. And of course, significant swings in peer reputation score can always affect individual schools (some schools have seen more volatility in recent years).
Methodological notes: Any mistakes are my own. Where there are ties, they are sorted by score (e.g., if several schools are tied at the score of 35, the first-listed school has the “highest” score and the last-listed school has the “lowest” score), which is not reported here. But that is a huge caveat. A small rounding error could move a school from, say, 24th to 29th, but in my “score” the school might actually only move from 28 to 29. My efforts to replicate the USNWR rankings may appear to introduce additional errors in volatility. On data collection, I occasionally transpose some schools due to inconsistencies in how the ABA reports school names. Schools beginning with Chicago, Saint, South, University of California, or Widener are most susceptible to these inconsistencies. Schools with alternative pathways to bar licensure are likely to see more volatility than most because of the complexities in evaluating them. Additional complexities, such as the “merger” of Penn State’s two law schools or newly-accredited schools like Jacksonville, could further complicate any analysis.