We hope you’re ready, because it’s almost the most wonderful time of the year for law schools. That’s right, the 2020 U.S. News law school rankings will be published on March 12, 2019. What’s that? You don’t want to wait until next week? Neither do we, so we’ve got a leak of the full 2020 rankings for you to feast your eyes upon.

Law school deans are saying their last prayers to rankings god guru Bob Morse in the hope that they won’t be ousted from their positions thanks to a few lost spots on the list, while prospective law students are getting ready to send out seat deposits to the law school with the best rank. As for current law students, they’re just waiting to see if the school they’ll graduate from will be considered more or less prestigious than when they first decided to debt-finance their futures based on their alma mater’s rank.

Today’s U.S. News rankings leak comes to us courtesy of Mike Spivey of the Spivey Consulting Group, who broke the news. For the past several years, Spivey has obtained the law school rankings ahead of their official publication, and they are always accurate. You can review them here, or at his blog here.

Take a look at the new T14 law schools. We’ve got a brand new three-way tie:

1. Yale University

2. Stanford University

3. Harvard University

4. University of Chicago

5. Columbia University

6. New York University

7. University of Pennsylvania

8. University of Virginia (+1)

9. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor (-1)

10. University of California–Berkeley (-1)

10. Duke University (+1)

10. Northwestern University (+1)

13. Cornell University

14. Georgetown University

UVA and Michigan switched places, and Duke and Northwestern are both back in the Top 10. Nothing terribly exciting happened in this portion of the rankings this year.

Now, let’s take a gander at the law schools outside of the T14. Like years past, we’re faced with yet another rankings orgy, with nothing but ties, ties, and more ties. There are four ties in this segment of the rankings alone (two two-way ties, one three-way tie, and one four-way tie), with more to follow. Here are the schools ranked 15 – 31:

15. University of California–Los Angeles (+1)

16. University of Texas–Austin (-1)

17. University of Southern California (Gould) (+2)

18. Vanderbilt University (-1)

18. Washington University in St. Louis

20. University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

21. University of Notre Dame (+3)

22. George Washington University (+2)

23. Boston University (-1)

23. University of California–Irvine (-2)

25. University of Alabama (+2)

26. Emory University (-4)

27. Boston College

27. University of Georgia (+5)

27. University of Iowa

27. Arizona State University (O’Connor)

31. University of California–Davis (+6)

31. University of Florida (Levin) (+10)

31. Wake Forest University (+1)

The big winners here are Florida, UC Davis, and Georgia, up 10, six, and five spots in the rankings, respectively. Congratulations to each school, as they must be doing something right to scale the rankings. The biggest loser in this segment of the rankings is Emory, with a four-spot drop (which isn’t too bad in the grand scheme of the 2020 rankings) that booted the school out of the Top 25. Ouch.

Now, for the rest of the law schools in the Top 48, where there are one tie, one three-way tie, and two five-way ties. As you can see, there was A LOT of movement here:

34. University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (+11)

34. Indiana University–Bloomington (Maurer) (-2)

34. Ohio State University (Moritz) (-2)

34. University of Wisconsin–Madison (-7)

34. Washington and Lee University (-8)

39. College of William and Mary (Marshall-Wythe) (-2)

39. Fordham University (-2)

39. University of Arizona (Rogers) (+2)

39. University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (-2)

39. Brigham Young University (Clark) (+2)

44. University of Washington (-12)

45. University of Colorado–Boulder (+1)

45. George Mason University (-4)

47. University of Utah (Quinney) (+7)

48. Florida State University (-1)

48. Temple University (Beasley) (-1)

48. Baylor University (+2)

The biggest winners here were Utah and UNC, which moved up seven and 11 places in the 2020 law school rankings. The biggest losers here were Wisconsin, Washington and Lee, and Washington, with seven-, eight-, and 12-spot drops, respectively. Whatever those schools are doing, they better shape up, because they’ve already been shipped out of the Top 30 — and almost out of the Top 50.

The rest of the leaked rankings are available on the next page.

2020 USNWR Rankings (2019 Release) [Spivey Consulting]

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.