Paul L. Caron
Dean





Friday, March 22, 2019

2020 U.S. News Legal Writing Rankings

6a00d8341c4eab53ef0240a490199b200b-250wiUpdate: 2021 U.S. News Legal Writing Rankings

The new 2020 U.S. News Legal Writing Rankings include the legal writing programs at 163 law schools (the faculty survey had a 43% response rate). Here are the Top 50:

Rank Score School
1 4.5 UNLV
2 4.1 Seattle
3 4.0 Stetson
3 4.0 Suffolk
5 3.9 Arizona State
5 3.9 Oregon
5 3.9 Wake Forest
8 3.8 Denver
8 3.8 John Marshall (IL)
8 3.8 North Carolina
11 3.7 Temple
12 3.6 Arkansas (Little Rock)
12 3.6 Georgetown
14 3.5 Drexel
14 3.5 Duquesne
14 3.5 Marquette
14 3.5 Mercer
14 3.5 Michigan
14 3.5 UC-Irvine
20 3.4 Drake 
20 3.4 Indiana (McKinney)
20 3.4 Missouri (Kansas City)
20 3.4 Northwestern
20 3.4 Nova
20 3.4 Pacific
20 3.4 Rutgers
20 3.4 Texas Tech
20 3.4 Washburn
29 3.3 Arizona
29 3.3 Baltimore
29 3.3 Boston College
29 3.3 Brooklyn
29 3.3 Lewis & Clark
29 3.3 Memphis
29 3.3 Texas
29 3.3 Villanova
37 3.2 Chicago-Kent
37 3.2 Iowa
37 3.2 Ohio State
37 3.2 Tennessee
37 3.2 Texas A&M
42 3.1 Arkansas (Fayetteville)
42 3.1 DePaul
42 3.1 Duke
42 3.1 Loyola-Chicago
42 3.1 Loyola-New Orleans
42 3.1 Northeastern
42 3.1 South Carolina
42 3.1 Syracuse
42 3.1 Univ. of Washington
42 3.1 Wyoming

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:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/03/2020-us-news-legal-writing-rankings.html

Law School Rankings, Legal Ed Rankings, Legal Education | Permalink

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