Legal Research is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #37 most popular master's degree program in the country. This means you won't have too much trouble finding schools that offer the degree.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 4 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Legal Research Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,284 master's degrees in legal research during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Legal Research School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of legal research for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality legal research 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
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a host of different 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 master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master'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 legal research students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of legal research students who choose to seek a master'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 legal research to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized legal research related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for legal research students working on their master's degree.
The legal research 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 Legal Research Master's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region.
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Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in legal research needs to look into University of Miami. Located in the suburb of Coral Gables, U Miami is a private not-for-profit university with a large student population.
Students who graduate with their master's from the legal research program state that they receive average early career earnings of $75,849.
Liberty University is one of the finest schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in legal research. Liberty University is a very large private not-for-profit university located in the city of Lynchburg.
Soon after graduating, legal research master's recipients generally make about $48,834 at the beginning of their careers.
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
Your choice of legal research for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality legal research program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
