University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School placed No. 4 in the 2026 U.S. News & World Report rankings of the country’s best law schools, rebounding one spot from last year.
Penn Carey Law tied with the University of Virginia School of Law — the school that pushed it down to the No. 5 spot last year. The 2026 rankings mark the fourth year since Penn Carey Law announced it would stop submitting data to U.S. News.
U.S. News ranked Stanford Law School alone at first, followed by Yale Law School and the University of Chicago Law School tied for second place — ending Yale’s 36 consecutive years in the No. 1 spot.
According to the U.S. News website, the organization’s law school ranking is based on several data points — including employment outcomes, faculty resources, and student credentials. Of the 10 factors that determine the ranking, employment outcome accounts for 60% of the final rating.
In this year’s ranking, Penn Carey Law had an overall score of 97, a peer assessment score of 4.4 out of 5, and a lawyer assessment score of 4.3 out of 5.
The school’s highest-ranked specialties were “business/corporate law” and “contract/commercial law.”
In 2022, Penn Carey Law declared that it would no longer submit data to participate in the U.S. News ranking. The school cited concerns with the “unnecessarily secretive” methodology, which it described as “contrary to important parts of our mission.”
Several peer institutions — such as the law schools at Harvard University, Yale University, and Columbia University — have also declined to submit data to the organization.
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“After careful consideration, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School will not submit the U.S. News & World Report institutional survey for this year as part of the ranking process,” a Penn Carey Law press release read at the time.
“In the interest of greater transparency, we will make relevant data public so that anyone can see the inputs that make Penn Carey Law a leading law school and how our alumni launch careers in every sector of the legal profession,” the statement continued.
Between late 2025 and early 2026, U.S. News requested data from 200 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association and received 157 responses.
The organization evaluated each school’s rank according to 10 factors. The total scores were then standardized and rescaled so that the No. 1 school received a score of 100. Subsequent rankings were assigned as a percentage of the top score.
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Staff reporter Cathy Sui covers federal policy and can be reached at sui@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies finance and statistics.
