Once upon a time, asking how many schools were in the T14 landed the same as asking for the number to 911. But once strict textualism died and U.S. News ranked 17 schools in the top 14, it became harder to not ask yourself if utility or inertia was the thing keeping the term afloat. As the number discrepancy suggests, the who of the T14 started changing too. There may have been some occasional re-orderings, but you could count on Yale being your dream school’s dream school, Harvard and Stanford forming the prestige triumvirate, all while Georgetown and UT fought over last place. Now, with Yale knocked out of the top spot and new names like Vanderbilt and Wash U. being relevant players, the title is going through a signification crisis that it probably won’t weather. Reuters has coverage:
“It’s not reflective of anything anymore. It’s not a remotely coherent grouping,” said Duke law professor Stuart Benjamin, who analyzed 36 years of rankings data in a post on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that argued the T-14 is obsolete.
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Law school admissions consultant Mike Spivey, who closely tracks the rankings, said the T-14 has outlived its usefulness as an indicator of which law schools are consistently the best. A system that groups law schools into tiers would be more useful for applicants than an ever-changing ordinal ranking, he said, noting that U.S. News’ medical school rankings follow the tier model.Benjamin said a single term for the most consistently high-performing schools is still valuable and suggested the “T-11,” since 11 schools have remained more stable at the top of the rankings.
There’s been a definite vibe shift in what meaning is left in the term; we gave our extended thoughts on its significance on last week’s episode of Thinking Like A Lawyer. And there’s an open question on what’s to blame here: are schools actually jumping around in quality year to year or does this have more to do with the observer? UC Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky commented that the school’s ranking results from shifts in U.S. News’ formula rather than any meaningful change in his school. That’s also what you’d expect to hear from a school that fell out of the T14 — I haven’t come across any naysaying from Stanford about stealing Yale’s spot.
Stuart Benjamin over at Volokh made the point much better than I did on the podcast that the T14 referent is heavily nostalgia-based — he brought the data to prove it! His proposed replacement for the T14 is to go with the T10. Doing so would knock my alma mater out of the conversation, but sacrifices must be made for nice round numbers.
Even if the data shows the T14 is dead, I wager we will witness its undying for years to come. Former members of the T14 wouldn’t benefit from giving up the association (Georgetown and UT come to mind). Newcomers like Wash U. and Vandy have no incentive to get off the pot when they just sat down. And do you really think that partner who is reticent to open PDFs is going change the mental school ranking schema they’ve had for four decades because someone showed them a graph? The “T14” will go the way of “Ivy League.” Ivy League wasn’t even a prestige designation at first — it was a cohort of old schools that played sports together. You probably know the canon Ivy schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale. But there are many claimants to the Ivy title. You have your public Ivies like Rutgers and William and Mary — with Rutgers being an especially strong candidate from a historical perspective. You have your “Ivy Plus” schools like Stanford and MIT. There’s even a whole book written about the 63 “Hidden Ivies” you could read if you need a scholastic break from billing those hours.
What will be lost if U.S. News debuts next year’s T14 list with 20 members? As a practical matter, not much. Assuming the list tracks job placement after graduation, a list of 20 well-placing schools means that applying students have a wider safety net of schools they can apply to that will let them pay off their gargantuan student loans. If you’re a data-driven prestige hound, you can stick to the T10 to stem the bleeding for a while but let’s not kid ourselves — isn’t this just a legal take on the New Ivies rebranding? Chemerinsky is probably right in that the rankings changing don’t have all that much to do with the schools themselves. The real change is happening inward and our internal models of where these schools fall won’t change all that much.
Law School Ranking Shakeup Sparks Calls To Retire ‘T-14’ [Reuters]
Earlier: End Of An Era: Yale Booted From No. 1 Spot In Historic U.S. News Law School Rankings Shakeup
All You Need To Know About The 2025 U.S. News Law School Rankings
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at christopherrashadwilliams@gmail.com and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.
The post The T14 Is Not Dead. It Is Undying, And That’s Okay appeared first on Above the Law.