Harvard Law School has dropped from from number two to three in the 2013 Best Law School Rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Harvard had maintained the number two position in the ranking for the three years leading up to 2013.
According to a U.S. News press release, the methodology used in the rankings did not change from 2012 to 2013, suggesting that either Stanford rose or Harvard dropped on at least some of the U.S. News ranking factors.
Profiles of the Class of 2013 and 2014 from the Dean of Admissions’ offices indicate that the Class of 2014 maintained the same LSAT score percentiles as the Class of 2013 (with the 25th percentile with a score of 171 and the 75th percentiles with a score of 176) and exceeded the Class of 2013’s Undergraduate G.P.A. percentiles (with the 75th percentile increasing from a 3.96 to a 3.97). According to U.S. News, the median value of these two admissions statistics form the “Selectivity” portion of the U.S. News rankings, which accounts for 25 percent of the overall score for each law school, suggesting that Stanford either increased its own “Selectivity” score or outperformed Harvard in the other categories considered by the rankings.