How many law schools are in the US: ABA-approved schools by state, size and type, and how to get the list

This page is for anyone who needs the number of law schools in America, and for companies that sell to them: legal research and writing tools, bar preparation, career services and recruiting platforms, admissions software, and law library suppliers. It gives the official count, breaks the schools down by state, size and type, shows where the full list and its data come from, and explains who buys inside a law school. For selling to practicing lawyers instead, see selling to law firms.

How many law schools there are in the US

The ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is the national accreditor, and graduating from an ABA-approved school is the standard route to a bar exam in most states. Every approved school must publish a Standard 509 Information Report each year, so the list of schools that filed is the working list of ABA-approved schools.

Why the counts differ

• The list changes slowly. Between the 2024 and 2025 reports, Wilmington University School of Law in Delaware was added and Penn State's University Park school, which filed in 2024, dropped out. Golden Gate University filed in 2023 but not since; the State Bar of California says it is teaching out its ABA program and starting a California-accredited JD in fall 2026.
• California licenses its own schools. Besides its 17 ABA-approved schools, California has 4 schools accredited jointly by the State Bar and an institutional accreditor, 17 accredited by the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners alone, and 8 unaccredited registered schools (4 correspondence, 3 distance-learning and 1 fixed-facility). Lists that mix these with ABA schools give totals well above 196.
• Membership lists are smaller. The AALS counts 174 member schools, because membership is a separate choice from ABA approval. Ranking sites also set their own rules for which schools to include, so their totals aren't counts.

Law schools by type and size

Private schools teach 74,550 of the 120,045 JD students and public schools 45,495. The median school has 540 JD students and enrolled 196 first-years. The largest are Georgetown (2,266 JD students), Harvard (1,784), George Washington (1,728), New York University (1,405) and Columbia (1,377); the smallest is Wilmington University (119), in its first year of reports.

The first-year class of fall 2025 had 42,812 students, 38,840 full-time and 3,972 part-time. Schools received 517,099 applications and made 137,721 offers; because each applicant applies to several schools, applications far exceed applicants. The median school admitted 35.8% of applicants, and the median of the schools' median LSAT scores was 159. Women were 56.1% of JD students (67,374).

Law schools by state

Our tally of the 196 schools in the ABA's 2025 reports by the state where each school is located; Puerto Rico has 3.

New York has more JD students than California despite having fewer schools, and DC's six schools, including Georgetown and George Washington, enroll more students than Florida's eleven.

Budgets, staff and graduates

All from the ABA's 2025 Standard 509 compilations and its employment summary for 2025 graduates. Medians are our calculation; schools that charge only by credit are left out of the tuition medians.

The faculty split matters for sellers: adjuncts outnumber full-time faculty, but the full-time faculty, deans and directors make purchasing decisions.

How to get the full list of law schools

The ABA spreadsheets name each school but carry no addresses or contacts. Join them on the school name, then add each school's own directory for the dean, library director and assistant deans.

Who buys inside a law school

A law school sits inside a university (or, for a freestanding school, is its own institution), so large contracts often pass through university procurement. As general guidance, these are the usual owners:

Courses are planned months ahead, so a tool for the fall first-year class is usually chosen in the spring before. The 509 data tell you a school's size, its part-time program and its bar passage before you write. For colleges more broadly, see our list of universities.

Worked example: a legal writing tool for first-year programs

Illustrative example. The company, its price and win rates are invented; the counts come from the ABA's 2025 Standard 509 compilations.

The seller: Brief Bench (briefbench.example) sells a writing feedback tool to first-year legal writing programs, priced per first-year student.

1. Pick the segment. Brief Bench targets private schools with 500 to 1,199 JD students, which it judges large enough to have a legal writing director and small enough to decide without a university-wide tender. The 2025 data have 67 of them, with 17,648 first-year students between them.
2. Size it. At an illustrative $75 per first-year student, the segment is worth about $1.32 million a year.
3. Set a target. Winning an illustrative 10 schools at the segment's average of 263 first-years each gives 2,630 seats, about $197,000 a year.
4. Time it. Contact directors between January and April, when they plan the fall course, and offer a pilot for one section.
5. Find the buyer. Each school's directory names the director of legal writing; what's changed (a new dean, a curriculum review, a bar passage problem) takes longer to find. Bebop finds the contacts and researches each school in the list.

Next step: profile each school with the account research template before you write.