The USNWR “peer score” is the single most heavily-weighted component of the law school rankings. USNWR surveys about 800 law faculty (the law dean, the associate dean for academics, the chair of faculty appointments and the most recently-tenured faculty member at each law school). Respondents are asked to evaluate schools on a scale from marginal (1) to outstanding (5). There’s usually a pretty high response rate—this year, it was 69%.

Until this year, Yale & Harvard had always been either a 4.8 or 4.9 on a 5-point scale in every survey since 1998.

But this year, Harvard's peer score was a 4.7. And Yale's was a 4.6.

What precipitated the drop (e.g., Harvard could be close to a rounding error, it may have been a 4.76 in the past and a 4.74 in the past) is anyone’s guess. But respondents do tend to react to certain influences, it would seem, and one could only speculate what might have prompted such responses in the fall 2021 or early 2022 when this cohort was surveyed.