After decades of holding the top spot in U.S. News’ annual rankings of top law schools, Yale Law School is now tied with the University of Chicago for second place, and Stanford holds the top spot.
Yale Law School is no longer ranked first in U.S. News’ annual rankings of the best law schools — a spot it has occupied since 1990.
Students and faculty brushed off the fall.
“I don’t think anybody cares,” Colin Dunkley LAW ’26 wrote to the News, adding that he suspects the rankings matter more for students at schools moving into and out of the top 14.
In this year’s U.S. News report, the Law School moved down to second place, where it is tied with the University of Chicago. Stanford now occupies the top spot.
Yale’s drop comes about four years after former Dean Heather Gerken decided that the Law School would no longer submit data to U.S. News for its rankings. At the time, she characterized the rankings as “profoundly flawed” in a statement published on a Law School webpage. She criticized the rankings for discouraging students from public service careers by classifying students who were awarded Yale’s post-graduate fellowships for public service as unemployed. Gerken did not respond to the News’ request for comment on Thursday.
Using public data, U.S. News continued to rank Yale Law School and other schools that stopped reporting data.
Several law students and professors largely dismissed the significance of the Law School’s new rank.
In a statement to the News, Law School spokesperson Alden Ferro wrote that the school “is focused on providing a rigorous and excellent legal education and increasing access and opportunity to law school and the profession,” adding that “we are proud to have sparked a movement away from these rankings four years ago.”
After Yale announced that it would stop submitting data to U.S. News for its law school rankings, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley and Georgetown also announced they would stop providing data. According to the Washington Post, 62 law schools did not provide data for the rankings as of 2023.
Sterling professor Akhil Reed Amar ’80 LAW ’84 cast the rankings in a different light, saying “we’ve never been number one in every respect, but we’re still clearly number one in many of the most important respects,” specifying Yale’s “intellectual tradition” and its “dominance” in producing the next generation of leaders and scholars.
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