Summary: The top ten law schools in terms of number of applications for enrollment.
Certainly the U.S. News Law School Rankings metrics hold enough sway to make law school deans quake, but the plethora of data they’ve collected regarding law schools expands to more than what they include in their official annual ranking. There are other factors prospective students might consider in the gambit, and one of them is the number of applicants law schools drew in 2014.
In this regard, Georgetown University law school won hands down with 7,793 applicants for fall 2014. Considering that only 55,700 students applied to any American Bar Association approved school in 2014, a number down significantly from a decade ago when it was over 100,000, that so many applied to Georgetown says something.
The top ten universities necessarily turned away most of the applicants, at an average of 24.4 acceptance rates, and with Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania admitting less than 20 percent.
The University of South Dakota tied at the No. 145 lowest spot with only 293 applicants, 83 percent of which were admitted.
Here is a chart of the top 10 accredited law schools that received the most applicants for 2014.
News Source: USNews
| School name (state) | Full-time applications (fall 2014) | U.S. News law school rank |
| Georgetown University (DC) | 7,793 | 14 |
| New York University | 6,193 | 6 |
| Columbia University (NY) | 6,188 | 4 (tie) |
| Harvard University (MA) | 5,943 | 2 (tie) |
| University of Pennsylvania | 5,828 | 7 |
| University of California—Berkeley | 5,669 | 8 (tie) |
| George Washington University (DC) | 5,549 | 22 (tie) |
| University of California—Los Angeles | 5,383 | 16 |
| Duke University (NC) | 5,358 | 8 (tie) |
| University of Virginia | 5,233 | 8 (tie) |