Legal Professions is of the hottest doctor's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #2 most popular major in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 4 schools in the Southeast Region to determine which ones were the best for legal professions students pursuing a doctor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 8,029 doctor's degrees in legal professions to qualified students.
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Choosing a Great Legal Professions School for Your Doctor's Degree
The legal professions doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a doctor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges for a Doctor's Degree ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
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
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to legal professions students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of legal professions students who choose to seek a doctor's degree at the school.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How easy is it for legal professions 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 legal professions related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for legal professions 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 Legal Professions Doctor's Degree Schools in the Southeast Region list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Liberty University is one of the best schools in the country for getting a doctor's degree in legal professions. Located in the small city of Lynchburg, Liberty University is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.More information about a doctorate in legal professions from Liberty University
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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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
by our College Data Analytics Team
The legal professions doctor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
