Washington University School of Law leaps to #1! Antonin Scalia School of Law (formerly George Mason University School of Law) excluded. See the full list here!

Lawyers of Color made a few changes to this year’s rankings that significantly shuffled the rankings. For starters, Washington University School of Law leaped from #15 all the way to #1. Washington Law outperformed the other top law schools in several categories, including the scholarship and grant awards, which are being evaluated for the first time. Washington Law also had a larger Black enrollment and JD award than most of the others at the top of the list with one exception–Howard University School of Law, which tumbled from #1, but remain in the top five. The biggest surprise was North Carolina Central University Law School, which benefited from our expansion of the national top law school rankings. NCCU Law ranks 69th on our selectivity scale and is in the top five law schools for enrolling Black students and awarding them JDs. NCCU Law also has an outsized proportion of notable alumni that include current U.S. Representative George Kenneth “G. K.” Butterfield, Jr. , former North Carolina governor Michael F. Easley, the first African-American mayor of Atlanta Maynard Jackson, Elaine O’Neal, first African-American woman to be Mayor of Durham, former North Carolina Superior Court judge, and famed class-action torts lawyer, Willie Gary.

The biggest change we made to the list was doing away with regional law school rankings in favor of expanding our national law school list. Rather than exclude law schools with low percentages of Black law students, we instead provide a footnote indicating the low percentage. There was, however, one exception. While it made the cut after our statistical analysis, George Mason University’s law school, renamed for Affirmative Action foe, Antonin Scalia, had an inexcusably low 2 percent Black law student enrollment even though it is located in Northern Virginia, which is apart of the D.C/Maryland/Virginia region that boasts the highest percentage of Black college graduates in the nation.

Finally, we actually include 66 schools on our list because we found UC Davis and UC Los Angeles to be very similar.

Below is a list of the categories considered though they were weighted differently:

Bar Passage Rate

Big Law Associate Placement

Black Law School Dean

Black JDs Awarded

Black Student Enrollment

Clerkships (Federal) 

Clerkships (State)

Distinguished Black Alumni

Grants/Scholarship Awards

JD Required Job Placement

Law School Location

Selectivity

Tuition