Last May, I projected USNWR law school rankings based on the publicly-available employment and bar passage data. New ABA data fills out most of the rest of the rankings data. I thought I’d update and see what changed. In short, not much. It’s not surprising, as I mentioned in May that this data is not only weighted less in the rankings but less subject to change. Most of the movement essentially occurred from changes in rounding errors that pushed schools up or down a tied spot.

Some ABA has data, which I tried to fix as best I can. I also have to approximate certain measures (e.g., which GRE percentiles USNWR uses), in addition to estimates of employment rankings, but these are about as robust as one can get. Of course, the peer and lawyer-judge scores will not be available until the spring, so I use last year’s scores. These are stickiest of all and least likely to change—but, given changes in survey response rates, it’s possible there’s slightly more volatility in these metrics.

As usual, I only list the top 100. Schools are sorted by rank, and then by estimated score within the rank (e.g., if six schools are tied at 50, the school at the top of the list has the highest score and is most likely to move up, and the school at the bottom of the list has the lowest score and is most likely to move down).

In the near future, I hope to model a few alternative rankings based on potential changes to the USNWR methodology that may be coming.