Year End Round Up: Super Lawyers List of Top Law Schools

12/29/09

According to the Super Lawyers' blogger, Bill White, ''We recognize that schools with smaller graduating classes may be at a disadvantage in our ranking. We considered taking into account class size, but decided not to this year for several reasons: First, we found that class size was not as big a factor as you might think. There were very large schools that ranked low and small schools that ranked high on our list. The quality of graduates, not the size of the school, is what ultimately determines where schools land on our list.''

White adds that ''Second, this first year we wanted to keep our methodology simple so that people could easily understand what we are doing. We reward schools that produce the greatest number of outstanding attorneys, period. Our approach is similar to the way baseball crowns a homerun king based on total homeruns without employing a weighted average based on plate appearances.''

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Topping the top three law schools was Harvard law School, University of Michigan Law School, and The University of Texas School of Law. The University of Virginia School of Law ranked fourth followed by Georgetown University Law Center, New York University School of Law, Columbia Law School, University of Florida Levin College of Law, University of California Berkeley School of Law - Boalt Hall. The Yale Law School ranked tenth.

Although some controversy has arisen regarding whether class size should be a contributing factor when determining the top law schools, White notes in his blog that Super Lawyers ''has been rating lawyers for nearly 20 years. This puts us in a unique position to shed light on how well schools fulfill the ultimate mission of producing great lawyers. Most law school rankings look at things like bar passage rates, professor-to-student ratios and the number of books in the library, but they ignore the end product — the quality of lawyers produced. We think it's like ranking football teams based on athletic facilities, player size and equipment without considering who wins the games.''

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Super Lawyers annually selects a list of outstanding lawyers comprised from 70 jurisdictional practice areas encompassing only 5 percent of lawyers from any one state or region. According to the Super Lawyers website, ''the objective of Super Lawyers is to provide a diverse and comprehensive listing of outstanding attorneys that can be used by consumers and referring lawyers as a beginning resource in the search for legal counsel.'' Super Lawyers is published by Law & Politics, a publication of Key Professional Media Inc.

Learn the 10 Factors That Matter to Big Firms More Than Where You Went to Law School

To view the complete list of law school rankings, visit:
https://www.superlawyers.com/toplists/lawschools/united-states/2010/