Law School Statistics: Where ABA-Accredited Law Schools Are, by State, Region & Public/Private

By the List of Law Schools editorial team · Last updated June 2026 · Figures computed directly from our directory of ABA-accredited law schools (ABA & U.S. Dept. of Education IPEDS sourcing).

We maintain a directory of 198 ABA-accredited (ABA-approved) law schools across 51 of the 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. This study looks at one thing only: how those schools are distributed — by state, by region, and by whether each is public or private. Every figure here is computed directly from the directory itself, so it matches our school and state pages exactly.

We do not rank schools or report admissions, tuition, bar-passage, or employment figures anywhere on this site. The counts below describe our list of schools — what it contains and where those schools are — and nothing more.

What we counted (and what we didn’t)

Our dataset records, for each school, only stable and verifiable facts: official name, campus city, state, and whether the parent institution is public or private. The list captures 198 long-standing, fully approved J.D.-granting law schools; the ABA approves roughly 195–200 J.D. programs, and that number drifts slightly as schools merge, close, or gain approval. We reconcile against the official ABA list and do not include unapproved programs.

Accreditation framing: American Bar Association, ABA-Approved Law Schools. Public/private control: U.S. Department of Education IPEDS. All distribution figures on this page are computed by us from the directory.

Public vs. private

Of the 198 ABA-accredited law schools in our directory, 111 (56.1%) are private and 87 (43.9%) are public. “Private” here follows IPEDS institutional control and includes private nonprofit and the small number of private independent/for-profit–affiliated schools; we do not editorialize on that split.

Geographic distribution by state

Law schools cluster in the most populous states. California has the most ABA-accredited law schools in our directory with 18. The five states with the most listings:

At the other end, 14 states have exactly one ABA-accredited law school in our directory: Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming. Our directory currently has no ABA-accredited law school listed in Alaska. In total the directory spans 51 of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, with additional schools in Puerto Rico.

Regional breakdown

Grouping schools by U.S. Census Bureau region shows where ABA-accredited law schools are concentrated, and how the public/private mix shifts across the country. The South has the most law schools in our directory, while the Northeast is the most private-leaning region.

Region grouping follows the U.S. Census Bureau four-region definitions (50 states + DC); Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is listed separately. Counts computed from our directory.

How we did this

We tabulated all 198 records in our maintained directory of ABA-accredited law schools, counting schools by state, by Census region, and by public/private control. There is no sampling, modeling, or estimation: these are exact counts of the list as published, recomputed every time the site is built so the study and the directory can never disagree. The underlying facts (accreditation, the J.D. degree, public vs. private control) are sourced from the ABA and U.S. Department of Education IPEDS; the distribution analysis is our own. Read more on our methodology page.