Law School Rankings

At Northwestern Law, we support rankings as a source of consumer information and believe they provide one way to measure our reputation and our progress toward the objectives in our Strategic Plan. Though rankings fluctuate over the years, our overall trend has been positive and we are optimistic it will remain so, especially as more of our graduates enter the workforce following the new initiatives from our Working Group process.

The following is a compilation of Law School rankings from various sources.

U.S. News (April 2009):
Overall:	10th
U.S. News Specialty Rankings:
Trial Advocacy:	10th
Clinical Training:	13th
Tax Law:	4th
Legal Writing:	10th
Dispute Resolution:	15th
International Law:	19th
Diversity:	5th (1st among top law schools)

Princeton Review (October 2009):
Best Career Prospects:	1st
Toughest to Get Into:	7th
Best Quality of Life:	9th
Best Classroom Experience:	10th

Vault (March 2008):
Top 25 Law Schools:	9th

National Law Journal (February 2009):
Percentage of Graduates Hired by NLJ 250 firms:	5th

Brian Leiter Rankings (updated in 2009):
Total Supreme Court Clerks 2000-2008 terms:	10th
Per Capita Supreme Court Clerkships	9th
Percentage of Federal Appellate Court Clerkships for 2008-09:	5th
Student Quality:	8th
Mean per capita scholarly impact (based on citations):	12th
Median per capita scholarly impact:	21st
Per Capita Placement in Law Teaching 2003-2007	12th
Success Rate of Law School Graduates on the Teaching Market 2006-2008	6th
Top 15 Schools From Which the Most "Prestigious" Law Firms Hire New Lawyers	9th

Super Lawyers (November 2009):
Number of "Super Lawyers":	18th* (11th among the top 14 law schools as ranked by U.S. News)
Law School 100 (August 2009):
America's Top Law Schools:	7th
Judging the Law Schools (Thomas E. Brennan and Don LeDuc 2008):
Overall Ranking:	7th

* This initial ranking, based on a simple count of "Super Lawyers" from each law school does not take the size of a school into account. Naturally, as a result, these rankings correlate closely with student body enrollment. The result is much more positive when factoring in law school size. For example, in most cases, each "Super Lawyer" graduated from law school at least 10 years ago. When converting the results to a per-capita basis based on total law school enrollment in 1999, we rank 8th among the top 14 law schools, ahead of Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, NYU, and Penn.