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Law Schools Which law school has best quality of life? Best career prospects? Princeton Review releases rankings

By Debra Cassens Weiss

December 16, 2021, 11:49 am CST

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Looking for a law school with the best quality of life? Then you might want to consider the University of Virginia School of Law, which took the top spot in that category in rankings released Tuesday by the Princeton Review.

The Virginia school, which is ranked eighth by U.S. News & World Report, took the top spot in three categories, according to a press release. Besides best quality of life, they are best classroom experience and best professors.

The Best Law Schools for 2022 rankings by the Princeton Review, an education services company, are based on surveys of 15,000 students attending 168 law schools in the United States and of administrators at the schools. The rankings name the top 10 schools in 14 categories.

The quality-of-life rankings are based on students’ answers to survey questions on: whether there is a strong sense of community at the school, whether differing opinions are tolerated in the classroom, the location of the school, the quality of social life at the school, and the school’s research resources.

The top five schools in the category are:

The University of Virginia School of Law

The Vanderbilt University Law School

The Florida State University College of Law

The Samford University Cumberland School of Law

The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Some categories in the Princeton Review’s new law school rankings are filled with schools that snagged top spots in rankings by U.S. News & World Report, according to Law.com. But some categories—such as greatest resources for minorities and women—include many schools outside the U.S. News & World Report’s top 14.

Two Princeton Review categories—toughest to get into and best career prospects—are entirely made up of T14 schools, Law.com reports. And T14 schools snagged the top three spots in best professors and the top four spots in best for federal clerkships and best classroom experience.

The 2022 rankings rely on surveys of students and administrators from the 2020 to 2021, 2019 to 2020 and 2018 to 2019 academic years. The 168 schools are roughly divided into thirds, which each third getting surveyed every three years to prevent “survey fatigue,” said David Soto, senior director of content development at the Princeton Review, in an interview with Law.com.

Three Princeton Review categories are based on information from administrators. They are toughest to get into, best for federal clerkships and best for state and local clerkships. The other lists are based on student data only or a combination of student and administrator data.

The top five in some of the other categories include:

Best classroom experience:

The University of Virginia School of Law

Stanford Law School

The Duke University School of Law

The University of Chicago Law School

The Vanderbilt University Law School

Best professors:

The University of Virginia School of Law

The University of Chicago Law School

The Duke University School of Law

The Washington and Lee University School of Law

Stanford Law School

Best career prospects:

The New York University School of Law

Stanford Law School

The University of Virginia School of Law

The Duke University School of Law

The University of Michigan Law School

Most diverse faculty:

The Southern University Law Center

The University of Hawaii at Manoa William S. Richardson School of Law

University of the District of Columbia David A. Clark School of Law

The Florida International University College of Law

The University of California at Davis School of Law

Most competitive students:

Baylor Law School

The Syracuse University College of Law

The Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School

The Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law

Southwestern Law School

All the categories are listed here.

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