Predicted 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings

With today’s release of the 2023 ABA-required 509 disclosures, we don’t just have the full set of law schools’ new medians and class sizes (compiled data with +/- here), but we can also calculate next year’s upcoming U.S. News law school rankings using the current methodology. Because of the rankings boycott, U.S. News now relies primarily on publicly available data from ABA reports. With today's 509 release, 75% of the current methodology's weight is now available, and the remaining 25% comes from the Assessment Scores (which are, in aggregate, very stable—some schools' will change, but overall they will be much the same as last year). That means it's possible to calculate the upcoming rankings under the current methodology with a good deal of accuracy.

All of the above said, please know that these predictions won’t be 100% accurate. For one, there are a few errors in the ABA data that we expect to be corrected by the time the rankings come out (in those instances, we've used last year's data for the schools in question). U.S. News will also almost certainly make some methodology changes (one such possibility would be introducing a faculty citation metric, as they did with the undergraduate rankings), and again, the below calculated rankings are based on the current methodology.

As you'll see below, our predictions show a lot of big changes. That is a consequence of the new methodology. With so much more weight now assigned to the more volatile Outcome metrics (58% compared to 21% two years ago), expect to see big swings going forward.

Importantly, as we have discussed many times in interviews with journalists, in blogs and podcasts (including this one), and across social media, one-size-fits-all rankings tend to be far more harmful than helpful, and applicants should not rely on them when making decisions about where to matriculate. The human mind craves ordinal rankings, because they allow us to drown out extraneous information, but the problem with law school rankings is that you need that extra information—and you need to decide what kind of information matters to you. Who is better at deciding what is most relevant to you: a singular media source, or your personal life experiences and future goals?

While rankings may, at best, serve as a starting point for looking at some schools to apply to, they should never be used in determining where you ultimately desire to go to school. Nor should one- or two-year fluctuations be over-interpreted. Remember that U.S. News (and any rankings outlet) needs change every year, or there would be no interest in their publications. That change is often arbitrary and vastly overstated.

All of this is a long way of saying that rankings are fun, and they can at times serve as a starting point in your law school journey. But as far as actually aligning with your goals and which school(s) are best for you, they are inherently flawed. That's why we caution anyone to use the below list just for interest and entertainment, not for important life decisions of any kind.