News

Northwestern Law in U.S. News Rankings

March 31, 2006

To: The Northwestern Law Community

From: David Van Zandt

Re: U.S. News Law School Rankings

As you may know, U.S. News and World Report will issue its annual rankings of graduate schools online on Saturday. The magazine will be available on the newsstands on Monday. While our objective numbers (admissions, placement, student-faculty ratio, etc.) remained as strong as in the two previous years with Northwestern ranked at least 8th in every category, the Law School’s overall ranking dipped from 10th to 12th.

I am disappointed by this minor bump in our path, but strongly believe that we are on the right track. Rankings such as these are certainly important, but are very rough and trailing indicators. First, our reputation among academics and practitioners as measured by U.S. News continues to trail the objective measures in terms of the increasing quality of our students and the broader national placement of our graduates. That is to be expected as reputations lag objective results. What really matters is that the long-term trajectory of the Law School in terms of our students, faculty, and programs is strongly upward. The reputational recognition by U.S. News voters will follow in due course. Moreover, year-to-year variation is to be expected especially given compacted scores of the top law schools: the difference in total scores between the 7th ranked school and Northwestern is only 3 points on a 100-point scale. (View an analysis of Northwestern Law's U.S. News ranking (pdf))

When I visit with legal employers throughout the country, they praise our efforts and especially the quality, experience, and maturity of our students. Northwestern Law has become truly distinctive in their minds. And our employment rates for the class of 2004 at graduation (97.2%) and nine months out (99.1%) point to the strong demand for Northwestern Law graduates.

In addition, our tradition of faculty excellence continues to play a key role in our ability to recruit other top scholars. And recent hires, including Dan Fischel, Al Alschuler, Kathy Spier, and Kenworthey Bilz this year and several others who will join our faculty for academic year 2006–07, have only strengthened the quality of our excellent faculty.

I am pleased that in the specialties rankings we rank 4th in tax law and 9th in clinical education as we did last year. This year our CLR program tied at 5th in the legal writing category, up from 10th last year, and we tied at 7th in trial advocacy down from 6th last year. Finally in another important category, student body diversity, we are tied at 26th overall and tied at 4th among the top 15, up from 7th last year.

I remain confident that we are on the right path, and very optimistic that as time progresses, our successes and innovative approach to legal education will be recognized by important constituencies in such rankings.

For your information, the top 20 law schools are:
1. Yale University
2. Stanford University
3. Harvard University
4. Columbia university
4. New York University
6. University of Chicago
7. University of Pennsylvania
8. University of California - Berkeley
8. University of Michigan
8. University of Virginia
11. Duke University
12. Northwestern University
13. Cornell University
14. Georgetown University
15. University of California – Los Angeles
16. University of Texas
17. University of Southern California
17. Vanderbilt University
19. George Washington University
19. University of Minnesota
19. Washington University – St. Louis

Specialties where Northwestern Law ranked in top 10

Clinical Training
1.Georgetown University
2. American University
3. New York University
4. Washington University – St. Louis
5. CUNY – Queens College
5. University of Maryland
7. University of New Mexico
8. Yale University
9. Northwestern University
10. University of Michigan

Legal Writing
1. Seattle University
2. Mercer University
3. Temple University
4. Stetson University
5. Northwestern University
5. John Marshall Law School
7. University of Nevada – Las Vegas
8. University of Michigan
9. Brooklyn Law School
10. Boston College
10. Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago-Kent)
10. Villanova University

Trial Advocacy
1. Stetson University
2. Temple University
3. South Texas College of Law
4. Loyola Law School (CA)
4. University of Notre Dame
6. Baylor University
7. Northwestern University
7. Georgetown University
7. University of Akron
7. Washington University – St. Louis

Tax Law
1. New York University
2. University of Florida
3. Georgetown University
4. Northwestern University
5. Harvard University
5. University of Miami
7. Boston University
7. University of California – Los Angeles
9. Stanford University
9. University of San Diego

  • Categories: