According to the latest issue of The National Jurist, Stanford Law School is the top law school in the U.S. My alma mater, LSU Law, ranks 11th. Yale Law is 13th.

While I’m certainly happy to see a publication outside of the South validate my law degree, I’m no fool. The only categories in which LSU traditionally trumps Yale are athletics and attractive co-eds. So how exactly did The National Jurist calculate its law school rankings?

The magazine used nine factors in three categories:

  • Post Graduate Success (50 percent): employment rates, number of graduates who made partner at National Law Journal 200 Firms, number of graduates recognized by Super Lawyers, bar passage rate.
  • Quality of Teaching (35 percent): student satisfaction, RateMyProfessor.com evaluations, Princeton Review scores for professor availability and professor interest.
  • Cost Efficiency (15 percent): Debt and diversity.

Post-graduate success, understandably, received the most weight.

Then The National Jurist worked its numbers-weighting-grading-curve magic:

The top 14 schools out of the magazine’s ranking?

To derive the final ranking, we converted the letter grades to a GPA and applied the weights listed above. Some schools did not receive a letter grade for all nine factors, in which case their final GPAs are based on the smaller number of grades. A school was excluded from the study if [its] missing factors accounted for more than 20 percent of the final GPA.

The U.S. News and World Report list is the benchmark for law school greatness. While this year’s U.S. News rankings are still a few weeks away, let’s compare The National Jurist list to the 2012 U.S. News list, shall we?

  1. Stanford University2. University of Virginia3. UC Berkeley School of Law4. Vanderbilt5. University of Alabama6. Harvard Law School7. Columbia Law School8. University of Pennsylvania9. Texas Tech University10. University of North Carolina11. Louisiana State University12. Duke University13. Yale Law School14. George Washington University

Interpret these rankings as you will. From what I can see, Stanford is a good bet either way.

  1. Yale2. Stanford3. Harvard4. Columbia5. Chicago6. NYU7. Berkeley7. Penn7. UVA10. Michigan11. Duke12. Northwestern13. Georgetown14. Cornell

What are your thoughts on The National Jurist law school rankings? And how did your school measure up? Let us know on Facebook or Google+.

Related Resources:

  • Law Clerk Ranks as 7th Most Hated Job in America (FindLaw’s Greedy Associates)
  • 51 Interesting Law School Clinics Around the Country (FindLaw’s Greedy Associates)
  • In a Law School Recession, How Washington and Lee is Thriving (FindLaw’s Greedy Associates)

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