If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a law professor, where you earn your J.D. may play a significant role in whether you ultimately make it into the legal academy.
Professor Derek Muller of Notre Dame Law School recently took a look at which law schools produced the most professors over the past decade at his Substack, Law School Docket. Using hiring data compiled by Illinois Law professor Sarah Lawsky, Muller examined where professors hired between 2017 and 2026 received their law degrees.
Raw hiring totals don’t tell the whole story here. Muller also compared those figures with each school’s average graduating class size for 2020, 2021, and 2022. Twenty-nine law schools placed at least five graduates into academia during the decade studied.
Which schools are most likely to produce future law professors? Here are the top 10, ranked by placements as a percentage of graduating class:
- Yale University: 8.6% (182 professors)
- Stanford University: 2.6% (48 professors)
- Harvard University: 2.0% (119 professors)
- University of Chicago: 1.9% (41 professors)
- New York University: 1.5% (69 professors)
- Vanderbilt University: 1.0% (19 professors)
- University of Michigan: 0.9% (30 professors)
- Northwestern University: 0.8% (22 professors)
- Columbia University: 0.8% (35 professors)
- University of California, Berkeley: 0.7% (25 professors)
Yale’s performance is truly in a class of its own. About one out of every 12 graduates goes on to become a law professor. No other school even comes close. Stanford, which finishes in second place, clocks in at just 2.6%.
Harvard produced far more professors in raw numbers than Stanford or Chicago, but Stanford performed better when class size was taken into account, with Chicago close behind. Vanderbilt also punched above its weight, placing 19 graduates into academia for a rate of 1%.
To see the full list, click here.
And what about the schools at the bottom of the list? American, Fordham, and George Washington each placed five graduates into the legal academy, amounting to about 0.1% of their graduating classes. Texas also placed five professors, while UC Law San Francisco placed six, with both schools posting rates of 0.2%.
Congratulations to all of the law schools whose graduates made their way into academia. They’re now helping to educate — and perhaps inspire — the next generation of lawyers and law professors.
Which law schools produce the most law professors? [Law School Docket]
Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or connect with her on LinkedIn.
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