By far the most popular ranking of top law schools is the U.S. News and World Report ranking, the first of which was issued November 2, 1987. Only the top twenty law schools were initially listed, but over time that number has expanded to twenty-five, fifty and has been at one hundred since April 14, 2003. For the most part, there is significant consistency in the school rankings, though a few schools, such as Stanford University, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania have risen steadily since the first ranking, while others have retreated.
The U.S. News and World Report rankings asses four major areas. The Quality assessment is measured by opinion surveys. The others are more empirical. Selectivity is measured by acceptance rate and student profiles; Placement Success reflects success on the bar exam and employment rates; Faculty Resources are ranked by expenditure, library volumes and student/faculty ratio. To combine these factors into a single score, the magazine gives reputation a 40 percent weighting, 25 percent to selectivity, 20 percent to placement success and the remaining 15 percent to faculty resources.
The exact rankings vary from year to year, but the schools most often listed as the very top law schools are Yale, Harvard and Stanford. Others schools rounding out the top tier include Columbia, New York University, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, Cornell University, Duke University and Georgetown University.
Some critics of existing law school rankings suggest the practice has more to do with marketing schools than offering a useful resource to prospective students. Reputation can be important, especially in the job market, but is debatable whether it should be the highest weighted criterion. Comparisons among schools grouped by field of study tend to be far more useful to students with an idea of the direction they'd like to take. Measures of selectivity are less subjective than reputation but may still reflect realities of supply and demand for space at an institution. Rankings that differentiate the category of their sources, such as peers, judges and lawyers, offer more depth to the traditional ranking list.
Another flaw in the U.S. News and World Report rankings is the number of ties that result from having too crude of a point system. The result in the 2006 report, for example, was that there were 84 law schools for rankings 17 to 100, with only 31 different possible point values. A proposed solution to this problem is to use three significant digits to create more subtle differentiations. This, solution, however, still does not address the concern of matching individual students to the professors and programs that best fit their ambitions.