If you pursue a doctor's degree in law, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #1 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 26 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Law Doctor's Degree Schools ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 35,647 doctor's degrees in law during the <nil> academic year.
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Choosing a Great Law School for Your Doctor's Degree
The law doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality law program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their doctor's degree from the school. After all, your doctor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to law students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of law students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Student Debt - How easy is it for law to pay back their student loans after receiving their doctor's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized law related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for law students working on their doctor's degree.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Law Doctor's Degree Schools list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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It is hard to beat Suffolk University if you want to pursue a doctor's degree in law. Located in the city of Boston, Suffolk is a private not-for-profit university with a moderately-sized student population.
Students who graduate with their doctorate from the law program state that they receive average early career income of $69,917.
The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.