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The US News T14 Is Dead, and Has Been Replaced by the T11 (or, if You Prefer, the T10 with 11 Members)

The revamped US News law ranking methodology adopted in 2023 has killed an old grouping and created a successor.

Stuart Benjamin | 4.7.2026 9:01 AM

To state the obvious, many people put a lot of weight (far too much weight, in my view) on the US News law school rankings. Good evidence of this is the prevalence of the term "T14." The label arose in the 1990s when people noticed that the same 14 law schools—and only those 14—occupied the top 14 spots in every US News overall ranking starting with the first one in 1990. (There was a 1987 ranking that was simply a survey sent to selected law school deans, but the rankings with multiple metrics began in 1990.) That is, not only were these 14 schools always in the top 14, but no other school even tied for 14th.

That pattern continued with remarkable regularity through the rankings released in 2022, with three tiny exceptions noted below. (Sidenote: after Georgetown fell out of the top 14 a couple of times, some—often Georgetown supporters—suggested that the T14 should instead be defined as the top 10 schools that had ever appeared in the US News top 10, noting that Georgetown ranked #10 once, in 1993. But by that reasoning Georgetown would forever remain a top 14 school, even if consistently ranked #30, which is pretty silly.)

Between its 2022 and 2023 law rankings, US News changed its methodology considerably, moving toward more objective metrics and away from spending per student—a metric that wasn't reported to the ABA and could easily be manipulated. We now have four years of rankings under the new regime, and a few things have become clear:

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