Law is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #1 most popular major in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 5 schools in the Middle Atlantic Region to determine which ones were the best for law students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 8,417 doctor's degrees in law to qualified students.
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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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we include a school's overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of doctorate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their doctor's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 complete 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.
The law school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Law Doctor's Degree Schools in the Middle Atlantic Region.
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American University is a good option for students pursuing a doctor's degree in law. Located in the large city of Washington, The American University is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a doctorate in law from American University
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.
by our College Data Analytics Team
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. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
