Last week I posted the USNews DR specialty rankings from memory having seen them on the Spivey Consultants home page.  They are now public, and newsflash, my memory was not quite right.  Apologies to Cardozo, which clocked in at 8 tied w/ Marquette (I had them at 9), and Hastings, which is not Cal-Berkeley, and clocked in at 10 tied with Arizona State and Northwestern.  Also, 92 schools were ranked this year – wow !  With such a high number of ranked schools and Spivey’s list of the rankings in their entirety, I promised to list the the top 25 ranked schools but only have access to the top 15.   Finally, with regard to the Hastings/Berkeley snafu, I should have known better, and in my defense the list said California, which to me means Berkeley, not Hastings, Davis, or UCLA.

Here’s the top 10.

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

My sources tell me that Maryland & Texas A&M tied at 13 and Quinnipiac came in at 15.  That’s all I got.

Congrats to all.

Update 3/18 – Rishi Batra was kind enough to give me the link to the DR rankings posted on Taxprof.  It goes up to number 44.  Thanks Rishi !

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.