Derek Muller (Notre Dame), Updated Projected 2026-2027 USNWR Law School Rankings (To Be Released April 2026 Or So):
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.
Derek lists the 2026-27 Projected Top 100 law schools. Here are the Top 25 (I included the projected change from the 2025-26 rankings):
| Law School | Projected 2026-27 Rank | 2025-26 Rank | +/- |
| Stanford | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Chicago | 2 | 3 | +1 |
| Virginia | 3 | 4 | +1 |
| Penn | 3 | 5 | +2 |
| Yale | 5 | 1 | -4 |
| Harvard | 5 | 6 | +1 |
| Duke | 5 | 6 | +1 |
| Michigan | 8 | 8 | 0 |
| NYU | 9 | 8 | -1 |
| Columbia | 9 | 10 | +1 |
| Northwestern | 9 | 10 | +1 |
| Vanderbilt | 12 | 14 | +2 |
| UCLA | 12 | 12 | 0 |
| Texas | 14 | 14 | 0 |
| Berkeley | 14 | 13 | -1 |
| Cornell | 14 | 18 | +4 |
| Washington Univ. | 17 | 14 | -3 |
| North Carolina | 18 | 18 | 0 |
| Georgetown | 19 | 14 | -5 |
| Notre Dame | 19 | 20 | +1 |
| Texas A&M | 21 | 22 | +1 |
| Minnesota | 21 | 20 | -1 |
| Boston College | 23 | 25 | +2 |
| USC | 23 | 26 | +3 |
| Boston Univ. | 23 | 22 | -1 |
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