September 3rd, 2009
Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession(Sullivan, et. al. 2007) and Best Pratices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map (Stuckey, et. al. 2007) both advocate major reforms of legal education. In a new article, Leading Change in Legal Education – Educating Lawyers and Best Practices: Good News for Diversity, 31 Seattle L. Rev. 775 (2009) (SSRN), Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (New Mexico) argues that the reforms would particularly benefit minority students:
The books both contemplate a move from the current model of large classes taught through modified Socratic dialogue to a sequenced set of course and experiences that build on basic analytical skill and provide opportunities for real life and simulated practice experience. Assessment would become more outcome-based with genuine opportunities for students to receive constructive feedback on their skill development as it evolves. * * * …[W]hile those changes would benefit all future lawyers …, the changes would be particularly welcome for students of color and members of groups which are under-represented in law school.
Id. at 776 (footnotes omitted).
Gary Rosin
Posted in Assessment, Law Schools, Student Learning | No Comments »
September 2nd, 2009
Jane Yakowitz (UCLA, Empirical Research Group) has posted on SSRN an interesting working paper, The Marooned Law School Graduates: An Empirical Investigation of Law School Graduates that Fail the Bar Exam, that looks at various sources with a view to establishing was happens to “never-passers”–law graduates who never pass the Bar exam.
Gary Rosin
Posted in Bar Exam, Law Schools | No Comments »
August 31st, 2009
Tom Bell has posted the third installment of How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got that Way. In this post, he focuses on schools ranked 41-51, 94-100, and the bottom 8 (according to his model). What I would liked to have seen, instead, are schools on either side of the major breaks: 2oth, 50th, 100th, Tier 3/Tier 4. If peer reputation is the biggest influence on rankings, what moved schools above these lines?
Gary Rosin
Posted in Law Schools, Rankings | No Comments »
August 31st, 2009
In a working paper on SSRN, LSAT Scores of Economics Majors: The 2008-2009 Class Update, Michael Nieswiadomy (North Texas, Economics) looks at average 2007-2008 LSAT scores by undergraduate major. The table below is from Table 2 of the paper (p. 6), which lists a total of 29 majors with at least 450 LSAT takers in 2007-2008:
Top 10 Majors by 2007-2008 LSAT Average
Rank |
Major |
Average
Score |
No. of
Students |
| 1 |
Physics/Math |
160.0 |
577 |
| 2 |
Economics |
157.4 |
3,047 |
| 3 |
Philosophy/Theology |
157.4 |
2,581 |
| 4 |
International Relations |
156.5 |
1,520 |
| 5 |
Engineering |
156.2 |
2,197 |
| 6 |
Government/Service |
156.1 |
578 |
| 7 |
Chemistry |
156.1 |
632 |
| 8 |
History |
155.9 |
4,169 |
| 9 |
Interdisciplinary Studies |
155.5 |
652 |
| 10 |
Foreign Languages |
155.3 |
1,084 |
Note: Majors with at least 450 takers.
The paper does not tell us whether (or when) the differences in means are statistically significant. In terms of practical significance, is the average engineeering major (156.2) that much stronger than the average Government/Service or Chemistry major (156.1)?
In terms of getting into law school, consider the distribution of the 75th and 25th LSAT percentiles of the Fall 2008 entering law-school classes (as reported in the 2010 Official Guide). An average Physics/Math major, with a 160.0, would have fallen in the top
- quarter (75th percentile) at 60% of law schools, and
- three quarters (25th percentile) at 85% of law-schools.
Certainly, the average Physics/Math student has a good chance of getting into law school, but not necessarily one of the top 50 law schools.
It also would be interesting to know how widely the scores vary within each major (the standard deviation).
Gary Rosin
Tags: LSAT, undergraduate majors
Posted in Law Schools | No Comments »
August 28th, 2009
In Signaling Value of Law Reviews, I noted an article by Al Brophy (North Carolina) cautioning that scholarship should be judged on its own merits. Paul Caron notes an empirical study of “the theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect),” that controls for article quality. In The Impact Factor’s Matthew Effect: A Natural Experiment in Bibliometrics, Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingras conclude
The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.
So, it’s not just a matter of the quality of the paper, but also of its placement. It follows that an author’s academic reputation is also enhanced by placement. Thus, the urge to “trade-up” in placement of articles. Presumably, a law school’s peer reputation follows (with a lag?) that of its faculty. Earlier, I discussed Jeff Lipshaw’s (Suffolk) thoughts on the penchant of ambitious young professors to “move up the food chain to a law school with a higher ranking.
Given the strong influence of peer reputation in the US News law-school rankings, should lower-tier law-schools try to move up in the rankings by using pay-for-placement bonuses to young professors that might be just moving through? Or does their ability to do that–or their earlier association with a school–also enhance the peer reputation of that school?
Gary Rosin
Posted in Law Professors, Law Schools, Rankings, Scholarship | No Comments »
August 24th, 2009
Over on TaxProf, Paul Caron notes in What’s Wrong with Law Schoola comment by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (UC-Irvine) that his professors at Harvard weren’t interested in their students. Caron notes that the faculty at his son’s college voted down a proposal to reduce the teaching load, and wonders if has ever done that.
With the talk about alternative outcomes and assessment measures, it will be interesting to watch what happens. Will those be limited to clinics, or will all of the law professoriate have to start worrying about whether students are actually learning?
Gary Rosin
Posted in Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching | No Comments »
August 24th, 2009
I haven’t looked at this yet, but this new article looks interesting: Alfred L. Brophy, The Signaling Value of Law Reviews: An Exploration of Citations and Prestige, 36 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 229-243 (2009)(SSRN). His conclusion is that
the results here suggest that we should we wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication. We should also be wary of judgments about quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.
Gary Rosin
Tags: law reviews, Scholarship
Posted in Law Schools, Scholarship | 1 Comment »
Do We Need More Law Schools?
September 24th, 2009According to The National Jurist (September 2009), there are 10 new schools on the way (pp. 12-13). That doesn’t even count
According to the ABA, there are now 199 provisionally or fully ABA-approved law schools offering JDs. The following chart shows the growth in ABA-approved law schools since 1923, when the ABA began approving law schools.
Twenty years ago (1989), there were 174 ABA schools. That’s 25 more law schools, or a growth of just over 14%. Assuming that all 12 of the law-schools-in-formation make it to at least provisional ABA approval, the United States will have 211 law schools.
How much of this is demand driven? According to the ABA, the number of JDs granted each year peaked in the 1996-1997 academic year, at 41,115, and then dropped for several years to a low of 37,910 (2000-2001). The number of JDs did not recover to at least the 1996-1997 level until 2004-2005 (42, 672 JDs). During that period the number of law schools increased from 180 (1997) to 184 (2001) to 191 (2005). That growth was not driven by demand .
The Bar-passage data for Mississippi College shows that 13 persons took the Louisiana Bar exam, out of 157 total persons taking a Bar exam for the first time. More Mississippi College graduates from Louisiana might have taken the Bar exam first in Mississippi, but still intend to return to Louisiana.
In the article, Bill Henderson (Indiana, Bloomington) wonders whether there will be enough high-paying jobs to let an ever-increasing number of graduates pay off their college–and law school!–loans.
Gary Rosin
Posted in ABA, Commentary, Law Schools | 7 Comments »