Legal Education
Stanford tops latest US News law school rankings, while Yale slips to second place
Stanford Law School maintained its top spot in U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 rankings of best law schools, as Yale Law School dropped to No. 2, now sharing that spot with the University of Chicago Law School, which moved up a notch.
Stanford Law School maintained its top spot in U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 rankings of best law schools, as Yale Law School dropped to No. 2, now sharing that spot with the University of Chicago Law School, which moved up a notch.
Among the top 20, Cornell Law School and the Boston College Law School each had the biggest jumps—of five points—according to the report released Tuesday.
Cornell Law School moved from the 18th spot to now tie for the 13th spot with the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law and the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. The Boston College Law School moved from the 25th spot to the 20th spot to share the spot with the Notre Dame Law School.
Meanwhile, the Georgetown University Law Center dropped the furthest—from the 14th spot to the 18th spot.
But a new survey from Kaplan found that 58% of law school admissions officers say the rankings “have lost some of their prestige over the last couple of years,” according to an April 7 press release from the education company. That’s a decrease from the 62% in Kaplan’s 2025 survey but higher than the 51% who had this view in a 2023 Kaplan survey.
Here are the top 20 law schools, with comparisons to last year’s rankings:
1) Stanford Law School (same)
2) The University of Chicago Law School (up one spot) and Yale Law School (down one spot)
4) The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (up one spot) and the University of Virginia School of Law (same)
6) Harvard Law School (same)
7) The Duke University School of Law (down one spot) and the New York University School of Law (up one spot)
9) Columbia Law School (up one spot), the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law (up one spot) and the University of Michigan Law School at Ann Arbor (down one spot)
12) Vanderbilt University Law School (up two spots)
13) Cornell Law School (up five spots), the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law (down one spot), the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis (up one spot)
16) The University of California at Berkeley School of Law (down three spots) and the University of Texas School of Law at Austin (down two spots)
18) The Georgetown University Law Center (down four spots) and the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill (same)
20) The Boston College Law School (up five spots) and the Notre Dame Law School (same)
Overall, the University of Miami School of Law and the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law had the highest jumps, each moving up 22 spots to 70th and 124th places, respectively. Meanwhile, the Cleveland State University College of Law fell the most, down 15 slots to 136th place.
Of the 198 current ABA-accredited law schools, 157 responded to this year’s survey conducted in fall 2025 and early 2026, according to U.S. News & World Report, with nearly 60% of the formula gleaned from the schools’ successful placement of graduates.
The rest of the score included academic metrics about faculty resources; achievements of entering students; and opinions by other law schools, lawyers and judges on overall program quality.
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