These US law schools aced the bar exam in 2025

By Karen Sloan

March 12 (Reuters) - Stanford Law School posted the highest bar exam pass rate of any U.S. school in 2025, new data from the American Bar Association shows, in a year when exam results improved nationwide.

All but one of the Bay Area school’s 176 graduates who took the attorney licensing exam for the first time last year passed—resulting in a pass rate of 99.43%. Yale Law School had the second-highest rate at 98.54%, followed closely by Duke Law School at 98.23%.

Harvard Law School and Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law rounded out the top five with pass rates of 97.90% and 97.75%, respectively.

The ABA on Wednesday released a trove of bar exam data detailing national results and figures for the 198 individual U.S. law schools it accredits. Passing the bar exam is a critical step for aspiring lawyers, as nearly all states require the exam in order to become licensed and practice law.

The new figures show that 84% of juris doctor graduates from ABA-accredited law schools who took the bar for the first time passed—up one percentage point over the 83% first-time pass rate in 2024.

In 2024, no law school’s first-time pass rate was above 98%. Harvard topped the list that year with a pass rate of 97.86%.

The “ultimate bar pass rate,” which reflects the percentage of 2023 law graduates who passed the bar exam within two years of graduation, increased to 92% from 90.5% the previous year, according to the ABA data. The ABA’s law school accreditation standards require schools to maintain an ultimate bar pass rate of at least 75%.

Elite law schools in the so-called T-14, which refers to the top 14 schools in U.S. News & World Report’s influential law school rankings, took seven of the top 10 spots on the list of schools with the highest first-time pass rates in 2025. But No. 43-ranked SMU; No. 28-ranked Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School; and No. 84-ranked Belmont University College of Law also landed in the top 10.

Texas law schools had a particularly strong showing in 2025, occupying four of the top 15 spots for first-time bar pass rates. In addition to SMU, the University of Texas School of Law had the 11th-highest first-time bar pass rate at 96.39%, Texas Tech University School of Law had the 13th-highest at 95.52%, and Texas A&M University School of Law was 15th with a first-time pass rate of 95.28%.

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