World league table looks at key criteria including employer and academic reputation
Law student bragging rights go to our cousins across the pond, with Harvard once again outperforming both Oxford and Cambridge in the latest law school world rankings.
QS World University Rankings, who complies the annual league table, placed Oxford and Cambridge in second and third respectively, leaving Ivy league player Harvard to take the crown for the fourth year on the bounce.
The rankings — which cover a whopping 48 subjects, including law — are based on the responses from 95,000 academics and 45,000 graduate employers from across the globe. QS then uses this information to rank law schools against four key criteria: academic reputation, employer reputation, research citations per paper and the impact of published work.
US uni duo Yale and Stanford placed 4th and 5th, while LSE secured 6th spot ahead of the University of California, Berkeley, in 7th.
Rounding off the top 10, Columbia University rose one place to bag 8th, New York University placed 9th, and the University of Melbourne dropped four position to finish 10th.
Other notable UK players include King’s College London in 15th, UCL in 16th and the University of Edinburgh in 22nd.
Last week Legal Cheek reported that Scottish law schools had put on a strong showing in a separate UK-only ranking complied by the Complete University Guide.
The likes of Glasgow (5th), Aberdeen (6th), Edinburgh (7th) and Strathclyde (8th) finished ahead of City law recruiter favourites including LSE (9th) and Durham (10th). Cambridge came in top.
QS World University Rankings — Top 10 by law:
| Ranking | Law school | Overall score (out of 100) |
| 1 | Harvard University | 100 |
| 2 | University of Oxford | 97.1 |
| 3 | University of Cambridge | 97 |
| 4 | Yale University | 94.1 |
| 5 | Stanford University | 92.9 |
| 6 | LSE | 90.4 |
| 7 | University of California, Berkeley (UCB) | 90.2 |
| 8 | Columbia University | 89.8 |
| 9 | New York University (NYU) | 89 |
| 10 | The University of Melbourne | 87.9 |