It’s a good thing lawyers love law school rankings, because there are tons of them. Every year, it seems like there’s a whole new crop of law school rankings to fight about with your friends. Aren’t you getting tired of them? No, of course not. Lawyers love rankings more than they love money (okay, maybe that’s taking it a step too far).
You’ve seen the Princeton Review law school rankings (and like us, you probably wondered why the hell so much emphasis was put on student feedback over actual data). You’ve seen the U.S. News law school rankings (and you watched your deans play the blame game lest they be fired). You’ve seen the ATL law school rankings (and you cheered for realistic, employment-based metrics). You’ve even seen the Cooley law school rankings (and you’re hoping and praying that the school hasn’t gained a sense of shame and will someday put out another edition because it’ll surely be a LOLable work of disingenuous art).
But have you seen a ranking of the best law schools in the world? Here’s your chance.
Before we get to the World Law School Rankings, let’s discuss the methodology used by the Quacquarelli Symonds team at Top Universities (you can explore more in-depth explanations here):
Each of the subject rankings is compiled using four sources. The first two of these are QS’s global surveys of academics and employers, which are used to assess institutions’ international reputation in each subject. The second two indicators assess research impact, based on research citations per paper and h-index in the relevant subject. These are sourced from Elsevier’s Scopus database, the world’s most comprehensive research citations database.
These four components are combined to produce the results for each of the subject rankings, with weightings adapted for each discipline.
We know you want to see if any American law schools cracked the list, so we won’t make you wait anymore. Here they are, the top 10 best law schools in the world:
1. Harvard University
2. University of Oxford
3. University of Cambridge
4. Yale University
5. Stanford University
6. University of Melbourne
7. London School of Economics and Political Science
8. UC Berkeley
9. Columbia University
10. New York University
USA! USA! USA! More than half of the world’s top 10 legal academies are in America! Be sure to grab your ivy and roll around in it, because half of those American law schools are in the Ivy League. Congratulations go out to Harvard for finally coming out on top of both Yale and Stanford in a law school ranking. You already thought you were elite, but now the entire world has to give you a pat on the back.
Farther down the list, but still within the top 25 law schools in the world, you’ll see Chicago (#11), Georgetown (#17), and UCLA (#23 in the world, yet not in the U.S. News T14). Going deeper into the list, but still within the top 50 law schools in the world, you’ll find Michigan (#27), Penn (#30), Duke (#33), Cornell (#35), and Northwestern (#50). But… where’s UVA? Every other U.S. News T14 school has already been listed.
Alas, it seems that the school was ranked outside of the top 50 law schools in the world. Quacquarelli Symonds didn’t even bother to show UVA’s rank — all we know is that it fell somewhere between 51 and 100. Ouch, how does it feel to have landed in the “rank not published” section of the rankings? Sure, it’s great to be ranked so highly on a world scale, but it must be really disappointing to be the only T14 school left out of the world’s top 50. Better luck next year!
What do you think about these worldly law school rankings? Feel free to congratulate or condemn your alma mater — but be careful, the world is watching.
QS World University Rankings by Subject 2019 – Law [Top Universities]
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.