The Top 100 Law Schools, Based On 5-, 10-, And 15-Year Rolling Average U.S. News Rankings

Bradley A. Areheart (Tennessee), The Top 100 Law Reviews: A Reference Guide Based on Historical USNWR Data:

The best proxy for how other law professors react and respond to publishing in main, or flagship, law reviews is the US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings. This paper utilizes historical USNWR data to rank the top 100 law reviews. The USNWR rankings are important in shaping many – if not most – law professors’ perceptions about the relative strength of a law school (and derivatively, the home law review). This document contains a chart that is sorted by the 10-year rolling average for each school, but it also contains the 5-year and 15-year rolling averages. This paper also describes my methodology and responds to a series of frequently asked questions. [Were there any ties? If two law school’s 10-year rolling averages were within 2/10 of a point, I tied them and then attempted to break those ties based on the current year’s peer reputation scores. You’ll see that where there was a tie, I have included the peer rep scores in parentheses for those schools. If the peer rep scores were the same, I allowed the tie to remain.] The document was updated in April 2019.

Here are the Top 75 law schools based on their 10-year rolling average overall U.S. News ranking:

Rank	School	10-Year Rank
1	Yale	1.0
2	Harvard (4.8)	2.4
3	Stanford (4.7)	2.4
4	Chicago (4.7)	4.3
4	Columbia (4.7)	4.3
6	NYU	6.0
7	Penn	7.0
8	Virginia	8.2
9	Michigan (4.4)	8.7
9	UC-Berkeley (4.4)	8.9
11	Duke	10.4
12	Northwestern	11.4
13	Cornell	13.1
14	Georgetown	13.9
15	Texas	15.0
16	UCLA	15.8
17	Vanderbilt	16.5
18	USC	18.4
19	Washington U.	18.7
20	Minnesota	20.5
21	George Washington (3.5)	22.4
21	Notre Dame (3.5)	22.5
23	Emory	22.9
24	Boston University	24.0
25	Iowa	25.1
26	UC-Irvine	26.0
27	Alabama	27.4
28	Indiana	28.4
29	Boston College (3.4)	29.5
30	Arizona State (3.2)	29.4
31	U. Washington	30.3
32	Georgia	31.2
33	Wisconsin	31.7
34	UC-Davis	32.2
35	William & Mary (3.3)	32.6
36	Washington & Lee (3.2)	32.7
37	Ohio State	33.5
38	North Carolina (3.4)	34.8
39	Fordham (3.3)	35.0
40	Illinois (3.3)	36.7
41	Wake Forest (3.1)	36.6
42	BYU	40.1
43	Arizona	41.1
44	Colorado (3.1)	42.3
45	George Mason (2.7)	42.2
46	Florida	44.5
47	Utah	45.3
48	Maryland	46.0
49	SMU	47.8
50	Florida State (3.1)	49.1
51	Tulane (3.0)	49.0
52	UC-Hastings	51.3
53	Baylor	53.6
54	Houston (2.7)	55.7
54	Temple (2.7)	55.8
56	Connecticut (2.9)	56.8
57	Pepperdine (2.7)	56.7
58	Richmond	58.1
59	Cardozo	60.2
60	Georgia State	60.7
61	Tennessee	61.6
62	Case Western (2.6)	62.9
62	Kentucky (2.6)	63.0
64	Seton Hall	63.7
65	Loyola-L.A.	64.8
66	American	66.7
67	Miami (2.8)	67.5
68	Penn State-Dickinson (2.7)	67.5
69	Oklahoma	68.4
70	UNLV (2.6)	70.0
71	Penn State-Univ. Park (2.4)	70.0
72	Denver	70.3
73	Cincinnati (2.4)	70.7
73	Nebraska (2.4)	70.8
75	Kansas	72.7