There was no movement among the top six schools, with Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School maintaining their positions at the top of the list. In fact, the only changes among the top 10 were that the University of Michigan Law School moved up two spots to No. 7, and that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law moved down two spots to No. 9. The University of Virginia School of Law inched up one spot to tie for No. 9.
The real attention-getter on this year’s list, which the magazine was scheduled to publish on March 15, will likely be the extension of numerical rankings beyond the top 100 and elimination of the old alphabetically listed third and fourth tiers. Instead, the rankings are now broken into two sections: the top-ranked 145 schools as determined by their numerical scores, and a second tier of 45 schools listed alphabetically but not given an overall rank.
