Thomas Cooley Law School has released the 12th annual edition of its law school rankings, Judging the Law Schools. The ranking is based an equal (2.5%) weights assigned to 40 objective variables from the Official ABA Guide to Approved Law Schools. Many of these variables favor large law schools:
- J.D. enrollment
- Minority J.D. enrollment
- Foreign J.D. enrollment
- 1L enrollment
- 1L minority enrollment
- Applications
- Number of full-time faculty
- Number of part-time faculty
- Total teaching faculty
- Number of minority faculty
- Number of 2L & 3L courses
- Library expenditures
- Total volumes in library
- Total titles in library
- Total serial subscriptions
- Number of professional librarians
- Library seating capacity
- Number of networked computers available for student use
- Total library square footage
- Total non-library square footage
- Total law school square footage
- Number of states in which graduates are employed
Here are the Top 50 Law Schools under this methodology (along with the school’s U.S. News rank and total J.D. enrollment):
- Harvard (#2 in U.S. News; 1,765 students)
- Thomas M. Cooley (Tier 4; 3,727)
- Georgetown (#14; 1,982)
- NYU (#6; 1,427)
- Virginia (#10; 1,122)
- Columbia (#4; 1,310)
- Northwestern (#11; 814)
- Texas (#15; 1,182)
- George Washington (#20; 1,632)
- Yale (#1; 613)
- American (#48; 1,485)
- Michigan (#9; 1,117)
- Pennsylvania (#7; 791)
- Boston University (#22; 830)
- Miami (#60; 1,384)
- UCLA (#15; 1,011)
- Fordham (#34; 1,469)
- Washington University (#19; 856)
- Minnesota (#22; 766)
- UC-Hastings (#42; 1,299)
- Wisconsin (#28; 825)
- Maryland (#48; 953)
- Brooklyn (#67; 1,458)
- Houston (#60; 898)
- Temple (#72; 976)
- Loyola-L.A. (#56; 1,287)
- UC-Berkeley (#7; 892)
- Chicago-Kent (#80; 948)
- Emory (#22; 715)
- Stanford (#3; 557)
- Duke (#11; 661)
- Suffolk (Tier 3; 1,682)
- Cardozo (#52; 1,121)
- Cornell (#13; 622)
- North Carolina (#28; 765)
- Stetson (Tier 3; 1084)
- Boston College (#28; 814)
- Indiana-Bloomington (#27; 622)
- South Texas (Tier 4; 1,278)
- John Marshall (Tier 4; 1,377)
- Chicago (#5; 590)
- Hofstra (#86; 1,109)
- Seton Hall (#72; 1,090)
- Florida (#47; 1,106)
- St. Louis (Tier 3; 967)
- Ohio State (#34; 669)
- SMU (#48; 903)
- Connecticut (#54; 641)
- Illinois (#21; 617)
- Lewis & Clark (#64; 715)
Note that this is the most extreme example of the phenomenon we observed in What Law School Can Learn From Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Tex. L. Rev. 1483, 1524 n.235 (2004): in every alternative ranking of law schools, the ranker’s school ranks higher than it does under U.S. News. The spread in Thomas Cooley’s ranking (2 v. Tier 4) is by far the largest of any of the alternative rankings we studied.
For more on the Thomas Cooley rankings, see
- Above the Law, Latest Cooley Law School Rankings Achieve New Heights of Intellectual Dishonesty
- Balkinization, Protean Rankings in the Economy of Prestige
