2020 U.S. News Trial Advocacy Rankings

Update: 2021 U.S. News Trial Advocacy Rankings

The new 2020 U.S. News Trial Advocacy Rankings include the trial advocacy programs at 187 law schools (the faculty survey had a 53% response rate). Here are the Top 50:

Rank	Score	School
1	4.0	Stetson
2	3.9	Baylor
3	3.8	Temple
4	3.7	Loyola-L.A.
5	3.6	American
5	3.6	Chicago-Kent
7	3.5	Denver
7	3.5	Pacific
9	3.4	Fordham
9	3.4	South Texas
11	3.3	Drexel
11	3.3	Georgetown
11	3.3	Northwestern
11	3.3	NYU
15	3.2	Houston
15	3.2	Loyola-Chicago
15	3.2	Notre Dame
15	3.2	Samford
15	3.2	Suffolk
15	3.2	UC-Berkeley
21	3.1	Georgia
21	3.1	Georgia State
21	3.1	John Marshall (IL)
21	3.1	UC-Hastings
21	3.1	Wake Forest
21	3.1	Washington Univ.
27	3.0	Campbell
27	3.0	Emory
27	3.0	Missouri (Kansas City)
27	3.0	Syracuse
27	3.0	Texas
27	3.0	UC-Davis
27	3.0	Virginia
34	2.9	Akron
34	2.9	Florida
34	2.9	George Washington
34	2.9	Harvard
34	2.9	Hofstra
34	2.9	Howard
34	2.9	Michigan
34	2.9	North Carolina
34	2.9	South Carolina
43	2.8	Alabama
43	2.8	Arizona
43	2.8	Faulkner
43	2.8	Maryland
43	2.8	St. Mary's
43	2.8	Tennessee
43	2.8	Tulane
43	2.8	UCLA
43	2.8	Univ. of Washington
43	2.8	Utah
43	2.8	Vanderbilt
43	2.8	Wisconsin

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.

2020 U.S. News Specialty Rankings:

• Clinical Training
• Dispute Resolution
• Environmental Law
• Health Care Law
• Intellectual Property Law
• International Law
• Legal Writing
• Tax Law