By Katrina Dewey | January 10, 2013 | News Articles, Guides
Our seventh annual Lawdragon 500 represents the best of the best, from Supreme Court justices to Fortune 500 General Counsel, White House counsel to law firm leaders and superstars of the plaintiff bar. As such, it's an interesting proxy of which law schools produce the standouts of the legal profession.
This year's #1 law school is Harvard, which ran away with the list with 71 alum featured. Those include: 5 U.S. Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts; the general counsel of KKR, Blackstone, Clorox and Twitter; the top rainmakers and leaders of the nation's most elite firms; and the head of the Equal Justice Iniative of Alabama and the ACLU's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & AIDS project. (And, yes, Harvard has a much larger law school class than its competitors; this is not a scientific sampling.)
The #2 and #3 slots are New York University Law School and Columbia Law School, with 39 and 37 graduates apiece. The huge New York representation partly underscores the regional factor in law school education. Because nearly 50 percent of the Lawdragon 500 practice in the New York vicinity, its law schools enjoy abundant representation of alums on the list. (Also showing up in the top 20: Brooklyn Law School and Fordham, with seven grads apiece.)
Rounding out the top 5: Yale with 34 grads and Georgetown with 26. Here are the schools with five or more grads in the Lawdragon 500:
Law School | 500 Members |
Harvard | 71 |
NYU | 39 |
Columbia | 37 |
Yale | 34 |
Georgetown | 26 |
University of Michigan | 17 |
University of Chicago | 16 |
University of Pennsylvania | 16 |
University of Texas | 15 |
University of Virginia | 15 |
George Washington | 13 |
Stanford | 11 |
UC Berkeley | 10 |
Northwestern | 10 |
Cornell | 8 |
Loyola Law School of Los Angeles | 8 |
Brooklyn | 7 |
American University | 6 |
Boston University | 6 |
Tulane | 6 |
Hastings | 5 |
Boston College | 5 |