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.

