Skip to content
PreLaw Advisor
  • Law school directorySearch and filter every school
  • Compare schoolsUp to four side by side
  • Areas of lawWhat lawyers do, and where it is taught
  • Degrees and program typesJ.D. formats, LL.M. and more
  • Costs and outcomesTuition, employment, bar passage
  • Admissions guideHow an application is put together
  • Application plannerChecklists, essays, deadlines
  • Law schools worldwideSchools in over a hundred countries
  • Data and methodologyWhere every figure comes from

↑↓ to move · Enter to open · Esc to close

Data sources & methods

This page explains where each figure comes from, how it is checked before it is published, and what you see when a school has not published something.

Sources

  • ABA Council list of approved law schools. The American Bar Association’s official lists of approved and provisionally approved schools, including probation and teach-out markers, part-time programs and distance-education J.D. programs. This list decides which schools appear and their accreditation status.
  • ABA Required Disclosures (Standard 509). Admissions statistics, tuition and fees, living-expense estimates, grants and conditional scholarships, enrollment, attrition, transfers, faculty and curriculum. Imported for report years 2017 onward.
  • ABA employment outcomes. Every category of the ABA Employment Questionnaire for each graduating class, kept as reported.
  • ABA bar passage outcomes. First-time passage, with each jurisdiction and the weighted jurisdiction average, and two-year ultimate passage, shown as separate measures.
  • Each law school’s own website. Requirements and deadlines for the current cycle, and the school’s clinics, certificates, concentrations, centers, journals and joint degrees.
  • NCES Classification of Instructional Programs. The federal list of fields of study, 2020 edition, used for undergraduate majors.

We do not use commercial ranking sites or admissions summaries, we do not publish rankings, and we do not copy LSAC’s data.

How values are checked

  • Every retrieved document is stored with its address, retrieval time and a fingerprint of its content, so a published value can be traced to the page it came from.
  • Checks run before anything is published: LSAT scores between 120 and 180, GPAs between 0 and 4.33, percentiles in order, percentages between 0 and 100, employment categories that add up to total graduates, and bar passers that do not exceed takers.
  • A record that fails a check is held for review and is not published.
  • Anything read from a school’s website is reviewed against the page before it is published. Nothing from a school site is published automatically.
  • A new report never replaces an old one. Each year and each application cycle is kept, and every change to a published value is recorded with its old value, new value and source.

School programs

Program lists come only from pages on the law school’s own site. A program is published when the school names it as a specific clinic, certificate, concentration, center, journal, externship or degree. Headings, news items, course titles, student organizations and programs that belong to another part of the university are left out. A list may be incomplete, and a program missing here may still exist.

J.D. formats (full-time, part-time, distance education) come from the ABA Council’s lists. The ABA approves J.D. programs. It does not approve or accredit other degrees, such as the LL.M. or a master’s degree for non-lawyers. What each degree and format means.

Areas of law

The catalog of areas is PreLaw Advisor’s own, written from public descriptions by LSAC, ABA sections and federal agencies, which are cited on each area’s page. Areas overlap, and the catalog is not exhaustive.

A school appears under an area only when a verified program on its own site names that area, such as an immigration clinic or a certificate in health law. A keyword match alone is never enough: each proposed link is reviewed, and links that rest on a general word are rejected. Schools are listed alphabetically. Appearing under an area is not a ranking and does not mean a school is strong or weak in it.

Undergraduate majors

Majors use the NCES CIP 2020 list so that the same field is written the same way. You can also type a major that is not on the list, and it is kept as you wrote it. Law schools admit students from every major. Your major is never used to estimate your chances.

When something is missing

A missing value is never shown as zero and never estimated. For admissions requirements and program lists, each school carries one of these states:

Verified
The value was read from an official source and reviewed.
Not published by the school
We checked the official source and the school does not publish it.
Not applicable
The item does not apply, for example a school on a teach-out plan that admits no new class.
Rolling admission, no fixed deadline
The school states that it admits on a rolling basis and publishes no fixed deadline. No date is shown.
No official source exists
No official source exists for this item.
Retrieval blocked
The school's site refuses automated retrieval or could not be reached.
Awaiting review
A value was read from the school's site and is waiting for review.
Could not be read
The official page was retrieved but the item could not be read from it.
Out of date
The value was verified for an earlier cycle and has not been confirmed for this one.

When a school’s current requirements have not been verified, its profile says so and links to the school’s admissions page. Always confirm requirements and deadlines with the school before you apply.

Application cycles

The current cycle is 2026-2027, for students starting in fall 2027. A school’s ABA report also states a deadline and fee, but a report published in one year describes the cycle that has just ended. Those figures are labelled as the prior cycle’s values.

Calculations

A few figures are PreLaw Advisor’s arithmetic and are labelled where they appear. Examples are full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required jobs as a share of graduates, and a cost estimate that adds tuition, fees and the school’s living-expense estimate. We do not estimate anyone’s chances of admission.

Latest data refresh

ABA list of approved schools
September 28, 2026
Standard 509 disclosures
September 28, 2026
Employment outcomes
September 28, 2026
Bar passage outcomes
September 28, 2026
School admissions pages
September 30, 2026
Consistency checks
September 29, 2026 (completed; some schools could not be reached)
Undergraduate fields of study
September 28, 2026
Areas of law
September 29, 2026
School program pages
September 29, 2026 (completed; some schools could not be reached)