Following up on Tuesday's post, 2025-26 U.S. News Law School Peer Reputation Rankings (And Overall Rankings):  Derek Muller (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), Benchmarking Law School Rankings Against Expectations, Performance, and Rankings Tactics:

Whenever the USNWR law school rankings are released, there are typical cries of “how did X school move to Y?” This usually reflects a kind of mental benchmark—schools X ought to be at not-Y but ended up at Y. That could be because there is an expectation that the school should be higher or lower than it is.

We all have expectations, then about where school “should” be. Of course, what USNWR uses for its own methodology does not necessarily reflect one’s expectations.

But schools do change over the years, and there are ways of helping reset some expectations against actual schools’ performance. Likewise, there are rankings-related tactics that some schools use that are largely—or only—explicable in terms of USNWR rankings metric performance, which can also help explains rankings outcomes.

Let’s start with two ways to look at schools’ performance: employment outcomes and peer reputation. Then we’ll look at a third: which schools’ tactics may be helping drive rankings changes.

David Lat (Original Jurisdiction), 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?

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)

Mike Spivey (Spivey Consulting), Law School and Higher Education Rankings Thoughts:

Rankings are not going anywhere. The human mind craves things that are given to us ordinally. Even at their worst, U.S. News rankings for higher education provide a compass of sorts. Of course, not all compasses are accurate; some are cheaply made with inferior materials. I find the comparison apt, because the material that makes up the current U.S. News law school rankings is inferior.

I have long called for more diffuse rankings, and Dean Donald Tobin now has his (in an “alpha phase”), which can be found on Paul Caron’s blog. We have a personalized law school ranking tool where you pick only the metrics that matter to you. There are plenty of others.

We are already in a higher education recession. Many schools will have to get off the rankings game carousel or be crushed financially. The problem is right here, right now, but so is the solution. Less attention to the U.S. News rankings and a bit more attention not just to the many others, but to attending a law school or college that is the right fit for your individual preferences and aspirations.

Washington Free Beacon, Harvard, Columbia Plunge in Law School Rankings Amid Anti-Semitism Backlash:

Harvard and Columbia Law Schools both plummeted in the 2025 U.S. News ranking amid ongoing controversies over campus anti-Semitism, while Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin joined the prestigious "T14" list.

Harvard slipped to No. 6—its lowest ranking ever—while Columbia fell to No. 10. By contrast, Vanderbilt and UT Austin—which work to combat campus anti-Semitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League—climbed 5 and 2 spots, respectively, to tie for No. 14. The ranking marks Vanderbilt's first-ever appearance in the "T14," a longstanding label for the top 14 law schools in the United States, according to legal commentator David Lat.

Derek Muller (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), USNWR Releases Three New Employment Categories for Law Schools, Something of a Mixed Bag:

USNWR … ranks the top 40 law schools in placement into law firms with 501 or more attorneys, federal clerkships, and public interest.

These statistics, for prospective law students, are something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, they can serve as important points of information (they’re already publicly available, of course!) to consider career outcomes and to put a school’s overall “ranking” in context. Schools highly ranked but that perform poorly in a desired outcome, or who appear to be lower in the overall ranking but perform well, may shift one’s attitude from the overall ranking.

But there is some concern of “self selection” here. Columbia, for instance, places very few students into federal clerkships and very many in law firms, simply because that’s the focus—if one wanted to get into a federal clerkship, one presumably could. NYU places a lot into public service, but it could place even higher than it currently does in large law firms. That said, there is not always selection effects at all law schools.

So there is value here, but it is somewhat limited, is all I’ll say.

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