Oxford University comes first
Glasgow University has ranked higher than the likes of Durham, King’s College London and its Scottish rival Edinburgh in the latest law school power list released over the weekend.
The annual league table, complied by The Guardian newspaper, assesses UK law schools on a range of criteria including quality of teaching, student to staff ratio and the percentage of law grads with a career after 15 months. The number bods at the newspaper then generate a score out of 100 and rank the law schools accordingly.
Glasgow placed fifth on this year’s list behind the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics in third and fourth respectively. Oxford University claimed the top spot, ahead of UCL in second place.
King’s scooped sixth place, Durham placed seventh and Solent University, Southampton, came in an impressive eighth position and ahead of the University of Leeds in ninth.
Rounding off the top ten, the University of Aberdeen (10th) placed ahead of Russell Group law schools, including Queen Mary, University of London (12th), the University of York (17th), the University of Edinburgh (19th) and the University of Bristol (20th).
At the other end of the table, City, University of London, came in 96th on the list — five spots ahead of Leeds Beckett in last place (101st).
This isn’t the first set of law school rankings to be published this year, with Legal Cheek reporting in June that Cambridge beat Oxford to the top spot in the 2021 Complete University Guide.
The QS World University Rankings, meanwhile, crowned Harvard University the best law school in the world ahead of Oxford and Cambridge in second and third respectively.
Guardian rankings — Top 10 by law:
| Ranking | Law school | Guardian score (out of 100) |
| 1 | Oxford | 100 |
| 2 | UCL | 99.7 |
| 3 | Cambridge | 99.2 |
| 4 | LSE | 91.9 |
| 5 | Glasgow | 88.8 |
| 6 | King’s | 86.8 |
| 7 | Durham | 83.2 |
| 8 | Solent | 83 |
| 9 | Leeds | 82.3 |
| 10 | Aberdeen | 81 |
