Our list is limited to 50 schools. We want to look at "national" schools, the ones with quality employment prospects both outside of their particular region and/or for graduates who don’t graduate at the top of the class.

We welcome you to the fifth annual installment of the Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings. These are the only rankings to incorporate the latest ABA employment data concerning the class of 2016. The premise underlying our approach to ranking schools remains the same: that given the steep cost of law school and the new normal of the legal job market, potential students should prioritize their future employment prospects over all other factors in deciding whether and where to attend law school. The relative quality of schools is a function of how they deliver on the promise of gainful legal employment. You know who else shares this view? The schools themselves. (Putting aside the fact that the schools would love to see all rankings disappear.) Our friends at Kaplan Test Prep just conducted an extensive survey of law school admission officers and found that 87% agree that rankings should more heavily weigh outcome-based stats like job placement rates. Further, when Kaplan asked which factor should carry the most weight in a rankings formula, the most popular response — by far — was the “law school’s job placement rate.” Find out what law schools had to say about those 'other' rankings here (video).

We prioritize employment outcomes above all else in comparing law schools. Therefore, these are the components of our rankings methodology:

Some further notes on methodology

Employment score (30%)

We only counted full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage (excluding solos and school-funded positions). Look, we know that there are some great non-lawyer jobs out there for which a J.D. is an “advantage.” It's not as if these jobs don't count, it's that they can't be compared in a meaningful way. The definition of "J.D. Advantage" changes from year to year and is based on a self-reported metric that defies independent third-party verification. One school's apples is another school's oranges, but we're not going to count lemons.

Quality jobs score (30%)

This measures the schools’ success at placing students on career paths that best enable them to pay off their student debts. We’ve combined placement with the country’s largest and best-paying law firms and the percentage of graduates embarking on federal judicial clerkships. These clerkships typically lead to a broader and enhanced range of employment opportunities.

Education cost (15%)

Solid data on individual law student educational debt is hard to come by. Published averages exist, but the crucial number, the amount of non-dischargeable government funded or guaranteed educational loan debt, is not available. So as a proxy for indebtedness, we’ve scored schools based on total cost. Data courtesy of Law School Transparency.

SCOTUS clerk & Federal judgeship scores (5% each)

Though obviously applicable to very different stages of legal careers, these two categories represent the pinnacles of the profession. For the purposes of these rankings, we simply looked at a school's graduates as a percentage of (1) all U.S. Supreme Court clerks (since 2010) and (2) currently sitting Article III judges. Both scores are adjusted for the size of the school. Obviously, we are aware that for the vast majority of students, Supreme Court clerkships or the federal bench are simply not prospects. But for the students who do want to be judges and academics, this outcome represents a useful separating factor for the most elite schools. Some schools put you in robes, others can't.

ATL Alumni rating (5%)

This is the only non-public component of our rankings. Our ATL Insider Survey asks students and alumni to rate their schools in terms of academics, financial aid advising, career services advising, social life, and clinical training. For the purposes of the ATL Top 50, we only counted the alumni ratings, as that was more in keeping with our “outcomes only” approach.

Debt-per-job ratio (10%)

A comparison between the indebtedness of a school’s graduates to the number of actual legal jobs they obtain.