2020 U.S. News Health Care Law Rankings

Update: 2021 U.S. News Health Care Law Rankings

The new 2020 U.S. News Health Care Law Rankings include the health care law programs at 129 law schools (the faculty survey had a 52% response rate). Here are the Top 50:

Rank	Score	School
1	4.5	St. Louis
2	4.3	Georgia State
2	4.3	Loyola-Chicago
4	4.2	Boston University
5	4.1	Harvard
6	4.0	Georgetown
6	4.0	Houston
6	4.0	Maryland
9	3.9	Case Western
9	3.9	Northeastern
11	3.7	Indiana (McKinney)
11	3.7	Seton Hall
11	3.7	Stanford
11	3.7	UC-Hastings
15	3.5	American
16	3.4	Arizona State
16	3.4	Duke
16	3.4	Temple
16	3.4	Yale
20	3.3	Pennsylvania
21	3.2	Mitchell Hamline
21	3.2	Wake Forest
23	3.1	DePaul
23	3.1	Drexel
23	3.1	Michigan
23	3.1	Minnesota
27	3.0	Arizona
27	3.0	North Carolina
27	3.0	Ohio State
27	3.0	Pittsburgh
27	3.0	Virginia
32	2.9	George Washington
32	2.9	Texas
32	2.9	Washington Univ.
32	2.9	Wisconsin
36	2.8	Emory
36	2.8	UCLA
36	2.8	Univ. of Washington
36	2.8	UNLV
36	2.8	Utah
36	2.8	Vanderbilt
42	2.7	Georgia
42	2.7	Washington & Lee
44	2.6	Quinnipiac
44	2.6	UC-Berkeley
44	2.6	UC-Irvine
47	2.5	Chicago
47	2.5	Columbia
47	2.5	Indiana (Maurer)
47	2.5	Louisville
47	2.5	USC

As I blogged last fall, U.S. News has dramatically changed their ranking of nine law school specialty programs:

Law school specialty rankings ... are based solely on peer assessments by law school faculty who teach in that specialty area. The peer assessment surveys for the specialty law school area rankings were conducted in fall 2018 and early 2019 by U.S. News.

This year for the first time, law school faculty members who teach in each specialty area rated the other law schools in that specialty area on a 5-point scale. Those schools with the highest average scores among those raters who rated them appear in the rankings and are ranked in descending order based on their average peer score they received in that specialty area. In all the previous law school specialty rankings, the law school raters chose their top 15 in a specialty area. This new methodology produced a significantly larger number of schools that were ranked in each specialty area – in some cases five or six times more. ... [A]ll programs that received 10 or more ratings are numerically ranked in that specialty. Schools with less than 10 ratings in a specialty aren't listed.

Other 2020 U.S. News Specialty Rankings:

• Clinical Training
• Dispute Resolution
• Environmental Law
• Intellectual Property Law
• International Law
• Tax Law