Ranking Law Schools with LSATs, Employment Outcomes, and Law Review Citations

This Article offers an alternative to the much-discussed U.S. News & World Report rankings. Where U.S. News rankings are affected by a wide variety of factors —some of which are criticized as irrelevant to what prospective students care about or should care about—this Article looks to three variables: the median LSAT score of entering students, which seeks to capture the quality of the student body; the percentage of the graduating students who are employed at nine months following graduation at full-time, permanent, JD-required jobs (a separate analysis excludes school-funded positions and solo practitioners from this variable); and the number of citations to each school’s main law review, which seeks to capture a school’s recent reputation. It rank-orders each of those variables, averages those ranks to obtain a new ranking, and then compares those new rankings to those of the 147 schools analyzed in U.S. News & World Report in March 2014. It identifies the schools that improve and decline the most with the new ranking.

This Article provides ranks for all 194 American Bar Association accredited law schools that U.S. News included in its rankings released in 2014, including the forty-seven schools that U.S. News put in its “unranked” category.