The Democratization of Major Gifts to Law Schools

In the first part of 2026, donors made more than $54 million in major gifts to law schools across the rankings spectrum. Cincinnati (#82) received a $43.2 million naming gift, New Mexico (#117) received $4.5 million in the largest gift in school history, Roger Williams (#171) received $4 million for a trial advocacy center, South Dakota (#122) received $1 million for its first endowed faculty chair, and—of course—Indiana (#49) received $1.6 million in targeted support for its 2026 graduating class.

This year’s giving story isn’t dominated by top-ranked law schools’ mega-fundraising—though those schools surely have their successes. Instead, public reporting has centered on transformative gifts (big “t” and small “t”) to schools outside of the traditional elite. Is this year’s good news part of a trend, and, if so, what does this trend mean for fundraising efforts across all law schools?

Some data, a couple of charts, and two top-20 lists, below the fold.

To put 2026’s giving patterns in context, I constructed a database of major gifts to law schools before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, I used web searches to identify publicly disclosed gifts at thresholds of $1 million, $5 million, and $10 million to each U.S. News-ranked law school. I tallied these gifts for two six-year periods on either side of the pandemic: Q2 2014 through Q1 2020, and Q2 2020 through Q1 2026. I also tracked final amounts and completion dates for major fundraising campaigns.

The results? Before the pandemic, major gifts were heavily concentrated. For this period, I found 73 gifts that met the $1 million threshold, made to 55 law schools (out of 198 total). By dollar value, more than half of these major gifts went to “T14” law schools (51%). Moreover, the top five gifts from the pre-pandemic period represented 45% of all major gift dollars ($375 million of $825 million total). The nine-figure naming gifts for Northwestern and Penn play a big role in this concentration, as do the other top-five gifts to Drexel, George Mason, and Pepperdine. But these general trends hold even when the top-five gifts from the pre-pandemic period are excluded (48% to T14 schools).

After the pandemic, major gifts became more democratized. For this span, I identified 102 gifts to 68 law schools, totaling $757 million. So more gifts (40%), to more schools (24%)—though a slight decline in total giving (8%). And, by dollar value, only 25.6% of these major gifts went to the T14—half as much as in the pre-pandemic span. After removing the top five gifts, this pattern again holds: the T14 receive 30% of major gifts by dollars, down by a nearly 40% from the prior period. Because major gifts tend to be lumpy, the data aren’t super clean. But the trend clearly points to more schools receiving more major gifts across more of the spectrum of the U.S. News rankings. That’s democratization.

So what does this trend mean? First, maybe not a lot. My data include only publicly disclosed gifts that I could locate on the Internet. There’s some self-selection, especially if norms about gift disclosure changed after the pandemic, or if web records are spottier from before the pandemic. For example, I found no major gifts for Stanford and Yale in the post-pandemic period, which probably isn’t the case. But one might expect lower-ranked institutions to do more publicity for major gifts—they’re a big deal!—which lends some credence to a characterization of major gifts as shifting outside of the T14 over time.

Counting dollar amounts also presents issues. As has been noted by Brian Leiter and Derek Muller (among others), major gifts may not inure to a law school’s benefit immediately or completely. Some gifts may be split across units; Colorado’s $2.5 million space law gift in 2025, for example, benefits three distinct units on a rotating basis. It’s not clear how to value a revenue stream that appears for two years, then vanishes for the next four years. My solution was to leave nominal dollar amounts as stated, without any adjustment for contractual or other restrictions. That’s probably fair, given the self-disclosure aspect to my data collection process.

Second, major gifts intersect with another public feature of law school fundraising, the capital campaign. Campaigns complicate the democratization story: by dollars they remain concentrated at the top, but by number they are now common across much more of the rankings distribution. I identified five campaigns that ended in the pre-pandemic period, for a total of $235 million. After the pandemic, I found 45 for, ahem, more than $2.5 billion. That’s essentially an order of magnitude difference for both number and amount. There was more concentration of campaign proceeds among the T14 law schools: for example, NYU ($540 million), UVA ($450 million), and Columbia ($325 million) accounted for roughly half of all campaign dollars. Campaigns may include major gifts, so there’s some risk of double-counting.

But campaigns are long, and many of these second-period campaigns kicked off before 2020. For example, NYU’s “Lead the Way” campaign ran from 2013 to 2021. And the long wake of the Great Recession probably interferes with a steady-state approach to this analysis. Still, the post-pandemic explosion in concluded campaigns—not at a dramatically higher average value, though many have been huge—adds nuance to the larger theme of donation democratization. Yes, campaigns are top-heavy. But 34 non-T14 law schools concluded campaigns in the post-pandemic period, which represents 76% of the total number. Across the rankings, campaigns are a common fundraising tool.

Third, the pressure’s on for schools outside of the T14 to maximize fundraising through major gifts and campaigns. The distribution of post-pandemic major gifts today is broader and flatter than before 2020: the median gift has increased ($3 million to $4.7 million), while the mean gift has decreased ($11.3 million to $7.4 million). In particular, state flagships and schools outside of the T50 have made strides in corralling (or, at least, publicizing) these $1-million-plus donations. The visible philanthropic economy of legal education is wider today than before 2020. That should matter to deans and development teams well outside the traditional elite, because peer schools across more of the rankings are now publicly demonstrating fundraising success.

If you like summary charts, here they are:

Share of Major Gift Dollars over Time by U.S. News Ranking, All Gifts

Tier	Pre-Pandemic ($)	Post-Pandemic ($)	Pre-Pandemic Share	Post-Pandemic Share
T14	$423,800,000	$193,800,000	51.4%	25.6%
T15-30	$62,810,000	$127,100,000	7.6%	16.8%
T30 (combined)	$486,610,000	$320,900,000	59.0%	42.4%
T31-60	$203,200,000	$190,000,000	24.6%	25.1%
T61-90	$81,635,000	$148,550,000	9.9%	19.6%
T91-150	$53,800,000	$76,860,000	6.5%	10.1%
T151+ / Tier 2	0	$21,000,000	0.0%	2.8%
Total	$825,245,000	$757,310,000	100%	100%

Share of Major Gift Dollars over Time by U.S. News Ranking, Gifts ex Top Five

Tier	Pre-Pandemic ($)	Post-Pandemic ($)	Pre-Pandemic Share	Post-Pandemic Share
T14	$194,800,000	$143,800,000	48.1%	29.5%
T15-30	$62,810,000	$53,100,000	15.5%	10.9%
T30 (combined)	$257,610,000	$196,900,000	63.6%	40.3%
T31-60	$62,200,000	$137,900,000	15.3%	28.3%
T61-90	$31,635,000	$55,350,000	7.8%	11.3%
T91-150	$53,800,000	$76,860,000	13.3%	15.7%
T151+ / Tier 2	0	$21,000,000	0.0%	4.3%
Total	$405,245,000	$488,010,000	100%	100%

Top 20 Institutions by Major Gift Dollars, Pre-Pandemic

Institution	U.S. News Rank (2026)	Major Gifts ($)	Major Gifts (Number)
Pennsylvania	4	$129,000,000	3
Northwestern	9	$100,000,000	1
George Mason	32	$83,000,000	3
Pepperdine	46	$58,000,000	2
Drexel	82	$50,000,000	1
Virginia	4	$43,900,000	1
Stanford	1	$32,400,000	2
Yale	2	$30,000,000	1
Chicago	2	$26,000,000	2
Minnesota	22	$25,000,000	1
Villanova	49	$25,000,000	1
New York University	7	$20,000,000	1
Albany	120	$17,800,000	3
Columbia	9	$15,000,000	1
Syracuse	100	$15,000,000	1
Duke	7	$13,500,000	2
Georgetown	18	$10,500,000	1
Case Western Reserve	100	$10,000,000	1
Montana	90	$10,000,000	1
Wayne State	62	$10,000,000	1

Top 20 Institutions by Major Gift Dollars, Post-Pandemic

Institution	U.S. News Rank (2026)	Major Gifts ($)	Major Gifts (Number)
Georgetown	18	$74,000,000	4
Washington	52	$52,000,000	2
Duquesne	85	$50,000,000	1
Pennsylvania	4	$50,000,000	1
Cincinnati	82	$43,000,000	1
Florida	34	$40,000,000	1
Tennessee	57	$33,000,000	1
Vanderbilt	12	$27,000,000	3
Duke	7	$25,000,000	3
Harvard	6	$25,000,000	2
Columbia	9	$20,000,000	2
Kentucky	70	$20,000,000	1
California – Berkeley	16	$19,000,000	4
Chicago	2	$15,000,000	1
New York Law School	112	$15,000,000	2
Creighton	144	$14,000,000	2
South Dakota	122	$14,000,000	2
Villanova	49	$13,000,000	1
Emory	40	$11,000,000	2
Virginia	4	$11,000,000	1