Stanford Law Knocks Yale Off #1 Ranking for the First Time

When I picked a law school some 30 years ago, I didn’t engage in a very thoughtful decision-making process. I consulted the Best Law Schools ranking of U.S. News & World Report, then picked the highest-ranked school of the ones that admitted me.

That was Yale Law School, the number-one school in the annual U.S. News rankings since their inception in 1990. But in the 2026 ranking, which U.S. News unveiled on Tuesday, Yale is no longer at the top.

Stanford Law School is now the nation’s leading law school, according to U.S. News. Stanford tied with Yale for the top spot in 2025, 2024, and 2023—but this year, Stanford stands alone.

I can’t say I’m surprised. In fact, back in 2024, I predicted that “at some point in the next few years, Stanford will be an undisputed #1.”

University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller—author of Law School Docket, a Substack newsletter about legal education—wasn’t surprised either. Back in December, he also predicted that Stanford would displace Yale, based on analyzing some of the data collected by the American Bar Association that U.S. News relies on in its ranking.

Yale didn’t fall far, however; it’s now #2, tied with the University of Chicago. The law schools of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia tied for #4. Harvard, a top-three school for most of the history of the rankings, landed at #6 (unchanged from its rank last year).

What factors explain the year-to-year shifts in schools’ ranks? “Because 58% of the rankings turn on employment outcomes and bar exam passage, the bulk of changes can be explained by those metrics,” Muller told me in an interview.

Indeed, Stanford overtaking Yale can be attributed, at least in part, to the schools’ employment numbers. If you look at the employment data for their 2024 graduates, 98.4% of Stanford’s 199 graduates had full-time, long-term employment (or were enrolled in other graduate studies, which U.S. News treats as equivalent to full-time, long-term employment when calculating employment scores). Meanwhile, for Yale’s 215 graduates, the comparable figure was 96.2%.

The difference between 98.4% and 96.2% might seem small. But when schools are so close to each other, as Stanford and Yale are, “little changes can make the difference,” Muller said.

Stanford also benefited from its high bar passage rate. If you compare the bar passage rates for Stanford and Yale, you’ll see they’re very close—both north of 95%. But as Muller explained, the U.S. News methodology gives schools extra credit when their graduates pass a state bar with a lower passage rate. This benefits Stanford, because its top bar jurisdiction (California) has a lower bar passage rate than Yale’s (New York).

Looking at the bigger picture, one might ask: Who cares? Do the U.S. News rankings still matter?

Some research suggests that they’re not as important as they used to be, with students focused increasingly—and understandably—on factors such as cost. But even if they might not be as influential as they were in my day, the U.S. News rankings are far from irrelevant.

“Of course the rankings matter,” said Muller. “They’re a factor that students consider—even if more and more students are focusing on other considerations, such as cost or employment outcomes.”

And should the rankings matter? They’ve received plenty of criticism—such as from the deans of Yale and Harvard Law, who in 2022 stopped providing U.S. News with certain data that the outlet required from the schools for its ranking. (After more than 60 schools joined this boycott, U.S. News changed its methodology, so it would no longer need cooperation from schools.)

The year-to-year shifts in rank—even including Stanford overtaking Yale, which will garner plenty of attention and headlines—honestly don’t mean much. But Muller made a case for the utility of the rankings as a whole.

“They should matter, at least a little bit,” he said. “Even if you might quibble with where a specific school stands, the rankings give you a rough sense of where schools stand. There are overall tiers or buckets that schools fall into, and these generally align with both common perception and employment outcomes.”

I agree. I don’t think students should treat the rankings as the be-all and end-all, as I did three decades ago. But students shouldn’t ignore the rankings either—especially given that other participants in the legal ecosystem, such as partners hiring associates and judges seeking clerks, do consider them.

And for better or worse, the legal profession is obsessed with prestige, so where you went to law school tends to matter more than where you went to college. Over the years, I have heard members of the profession comment negatively on where a lawyer went to law school—even if that lawyer graduated decades ago.

Michael Orey, director of public affairs at New York University School of Law, knows the rankings well. Last month, he published a novel centered around them, “Dean’s List”—focused on a new law school dean’s (seemingly impossible) mission of making his institution a top-five school within a year.

The novel satirizes the obsession that some administrators have with the U.S. News rankings. As Orey said in an interview, he decided to write a novel about the rankings after noticing that within academia, they’re often at the “very top of people’s minds,” which he found “interesting and at times absurd and, ultimately, fairly amusing.”

But even as someone who pokes fun at the rankings, Orey does see value in them.

“The world is a better place with more information,” he said. “And rankings are part of that.”

David Lat, a lawyer turned writer, publishes Original Jurisdiction. He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is author of the novel “Supreme Ambitions.”

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