Today the USNews rankings of law schools and law school specialty programs were “leaked.”  That means they were distributed to law school deans to prepare their publicity statements, to trumpet the good and explain the bad.  And the specialty rankings were tabulated differently this year, requiring voters to rate every school for which they had some knowledge.  So, the rankings were a bit up in the air, and we got a couple of surprises in the DR world.  First, Ohio State wrested the top spot from Pepperdine, which has achieved that status for something like 19 of the last 20 years.  And thanks to Jen Reynolds’ investigations, it looks like the top 5 has always been the same group of schools until this year when UNLV crashed the party. Furthermore, Cal-Berkeley cracks the top 10 and the rankings go all the way into the hundreds.  Congratulations to all.  And, both the CPR awards and USNews on the same day – big news day!

1. Ohio State
2. Pepperdine
3. Harvard and Missouri (tie)
5. Mitchell-Hamline and UNLV (tie)
7. Oregon
8. Marquette
9. Yeshiva (Cardozo)
10. Arizona State, California – Berkeley, and Northwestern

Note – Spivey Consulting posted the listings this morning and has taken them down, so I’m going from memory.  And if my memory is wrong, please point it out in the comments.  Once they are officially posted (March 12^th) I will post the top 25.